Refactoring
The last few years have seen a sea change in software development with the increasing popularity of agile approaches. As far as code construction (as opposed to project management) is concerned, the most significant effect has been the widespread adoption of two techniques—automated testing and refactoring.
Refactoring is the process of improving the design of existing code without changing its behavior. It is this latter, and sometimes overlooked, aspect of refactoring that will mostly concern us here. For a full introduction to refactoring, see Martin Fowler’s classic Refactoring [FBBO99].
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