Posted: Mon Jan 15, 2007 2:07 pm
From the first paragraph at http://www.refactoring.comHockey wrote:Refactoring without affecting the rest of the system (although ideal) is not always practical. I've always seen refactoring as making a design better overall - as a more cost effective approach to overhauling a codebase.
refactoring.com wrote: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 transformations can produce a significant restructuring. Since each refactoring is small, it's less likely to go wrong. The system is also kept fully working after each small refactoring, reducing the chances that a system can get seriously broken during the restructuring.