I showed this book to Dave at work the other day and we had a good chuckle…. There is already a term for prefactoring, it’s called design. Oh, and when you describe refactoring as:
“More often than not, developers will stop a large project in the middle of the build stage to rethink and recode the software design so it’s cleaner and more efficient. Known as “refactoring,” this process eats up valuable time and money. “
You really don’t understand refactoring in the first place. What the author is describing is re-design. Refactoring can be simply explained as:
“ 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. “ – refactoring.com
Which when used with TDD it eats up neither time nor money. I see Darrell is equally horrified.
-James
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I’ve skimmed this book at the book store (I check out books all the coding books I can, even yours Avery). I guess I’m guilty of treating the local Barnes & Nobles as a new-age library.
Anyways I obviously missed his definition of refactorying, it’s just so off the mark! And I definetly don’t like his tone that implies refactoring is a bad thing, imho it’s code improvement: streamlining, optimizing and increase code re-use, and bug reduction.
Right on!
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