Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

Chapter 7Encapsulation

Perhaps the most important criteria to be used in decomposing modules is to identify secrets that modules should hide from the rest of the system [Parnas]. Data structures are the most common secrets, and I can hide data structures by encapsulating them with Encapsulate Record (162) and Encapsulate Collection (170). Even primitive data values can be encapsulated with Replace Primitive with Object (174)—the magnitude of second-order benefits from doing this often surprises people. Temporary variables often get in the way of refactoring—I have to ensure they are calculated in the right order and their values are available to other parts of the code that need them. Using Replace Temp with Query (178) is a great help here, ...