refactoring

refactoring

Posted Sep 15, 2004 1:42 UTC (Wed) by maney (subscriber, #12630)
In reply to: refactoring by davidw
Parent article: How to Use ZenTest with Ruby (Linux Journal)

Why do people treat it like a big deal?

Because if you've been creating code without any overall plan, just doing the minimum needed at each tiny step, in accordance with XP dogma, you will need to do a *lot* of refactoring. Or perhaps you've inherited a crumbling pile of code that originated in a formal, rigid requirements spec, and it's just not practical to dump it and start over, so again, you're going to be refactoring like a madman (except where you can sneak in a complete rewrite of some especially dodgy bit). Etc.

Then again, the sort of improvement by rewriting that refactoring is seems not to be performed excessively often, so anything that encourages it is doing some good, even at the expense of mountaining a few molehills.

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