Articles
Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior. Its heart is a series of small behavior preserving transformations. Each transformation (called a “refactoring”) does little, but a sequence of these transformations can produce a significant restructuring. Since each refactoring is small, it’s less likely to go wrong. The system is kept fully working after each refactoring, reducing the chances that a system can get seriously broken during the restructuring. Martin Fowler Refactoring lowers the cost of enhancements When a software system is successful, there is always a need to keep enhancing it, to fix problems and add new features. After all, it’s called software for a reason! But the nature of a code-base makes a big difference on how easy it is to make these changes. Often enhancements are applied on top of each other in a manner that makes it increasingly harder to make changes. Over time new work slows to a crawl. To combat this change, it’s important to refactor code so that added enhancements don’t lead to unnecessary complexity. Refactoring is a part of day-to-day programming Refactoring isn’t a special task that would show up in a project plan. Done well, it’s a regular part of programming activity. When I need to add a new feature to a codebase, I look at the existing code and consider whether it’s structured in such a way to make the new change straightforward. If it isn’t, then I refactor the existing code to make this new addition easy. By refactoring first in this way, I usually find it’s faster than if I hadn’t carried out the refactoring first. Once I’ve done that change, I then add the new feature. Once I’ve added a feature and got it working, I often notice that the resulting code, while it works, isn’t as clear as it could be. I then refactor it into a better shape so that when I (or someone else) return to this code in a few weeks time, I won’t have to spend time puzzling out how this code works. When modifying a program, I’m often looking elsewhere in the code, because much of what I need to do may already be encoded in the program. This code may be functions I can easily call, or hidden inside larger functions. If I struggle to understand this code, I refactor it so I won’t have to struggle again next time I look at it. If there’s some functionality buried in there that I need, I refactor so I can easily use it. Automated tools are helpful, but not essential When I wrote the first edition of Refactoring, back in the late 90’s, there were few automated tools that supported Refactoring. Now many languages have IDEs which automate many common refactorings. These are a really valuable part of my toolkit allowing me to carry out refactoring faster. But such tools aren’t essential – I often work in programming languages without tool support, in which case I rely on taking small steps, and using frequent testing to detect mistakes.
