On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 3:03 PM, Siddharta G <siddharta.li...@gmail.com>wrote:

>  Refactoring just means changing the internals without adding/removing
> functionality. The book is good, but refactoring can be applied in many
> other contexts too. It has been happening long before the book came out.
> The
> big insight in the book is not the refactoring patterns themselves. The big
> insight is that its possible to make fairly large changes using small steps
> where the application does not break at any of the intermediate steps. It
> changes your thinking from I need to rewrite & retest to go from A -> B,
> now
> its like how can I go there in small steps without breaking anything in the
> middle.
>
> Unless you plan to keep rewriting your app everything a change comes along,
> I do agree that a self respecting developer needs to know refactoring (the
> concept, not the book)
>
> Refactoring myths -
>
> - If I write perfect code the first time, then I don't need to refactor:
> Wrong! Requirements change, and then your perfect code is no longer
> suitable, so you'll have to go in and change the design before you can
> implement new functionality. Thats refactoring.
>
> - Refactoring means cleaning up bad code: Wrong! See above.
>
> - Refactoring is only for OO code: Wrong! You can refactor anything, even
> imperative of functional programs. I have used refactoring (including some
> patterns from the book) on C programs.
>
> - "I have not seen refactoring used on open source projects": Wrong! At
> least on the django project refactoring occurs _very often_ to support new
> functionality. When multiple database support was introduced, the ORM
> design
> (which only supported single database) was refactored without changing
> existing functionality. After that the multi-database feature was added.
> Django has a policy of having unit tests for _all_ functionality, just to
> support easy refactoring. I'm pretty sure it happens in all large projects.
>
> - Refactoring is only for code. Wrong! We recently released a second
> product
> which sits along with our first one, and it required completely changing
> the
> architecture of the first one - we refactored the architecture to support
> the new product over 3 months deploying small changes at a time.
> Architecture changes, server configurations, database structure -
> everything
> was changed making small changes every week on a running production system
> with no downtime - thats refactoring too.
>

 That is re-architecting or re-designing depending on which side of the
 conference table you are - not re-factoring.


>
> --
> Siddharta
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-- 
--Anand
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