Refactoring
Monday, October 24, 2005 at 15:04 To Really Improve Your System You Can't RefactorI firmly believe in constantly improving my code and I see a difference in quality because of that. Seemingly this would put me firmly in the refactoring camp. But it doesn't. Why? Refactoring says you can't break interfaces. That puts me in an awkward position.
Refactoring is all about improving your code and making sure your tests still pass along the way. There could be no single method that works equaly good for everyone and in every situation, though. I once was refactoring the library and at some point just realized that it's going to take far less time if I just rewrote it. And so I did, and the resulting code was only 20% as big and it was all new code. But I still call it refactoring! Because even though I was writing a new code, I still had the existing code to consult with.
What's good about the method, though, is that we can automate some of the routine tasks of refactoring.
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