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Refactoring is the part of code maintenance which doesn't fix bugs or add new functionality. Rather it is designed to improve the understandability of the code or change its structure and design, to make it easier for human maintenance in the future. In particular, adding new behavior to a program might be difficult with the program's given structure, so a developer might refactor it first to make easy, and then add the new behavior.
Refactoring is done as a separate step, to simplify testing. At the end of the refactoring, any change in behavior is clearly a bug and can be fixed separately from the problem of debugging the new behavior.
An example of a trivial refactoring is to change a variable name into something more meaningful, such as from a single letter 'i' to 'interestRate'. A more complex refactoring is to turn the code within an if block into a function. An even more complex refactoring is to replace an if conditional with polymorphism. While "cleaning up" code has happened for decades, the key insight in refactoring is to intentionally "clean up" code separately from adding new functionality, using a known catalogue of common useful refactoring methods, and then separately testing the code (knowing that any behavioral changes indicate a bug). The new aspect is explicitly wanting to improve an existing design without altering its intent or behavior.
Refactoring is an important aspect of extreme programming.
The book Refactoring [1] is the classic reference. Although refactoring code has been done informally for years, William F. Opdyke's 1993 PhD dissertation [4] is the first known paper to specifically examine refactoring. All of these resources provide a catalog of common methods for refactoring; a refactoring method has a description of how to apply the method and indicators for when you should (or should not) apply the method.
Refactoring is such an important concept that it has been identified as one of the most important software innovations. (http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation)
Many refactorings are meant to cure the ills listed in [5].
This section is originally from Perl Design Patterns Book
To refactor text, in a WikiWiki, is to rewrite and often to reorganize the text completely or radically, sometimes dramatically shortening it, but in a way that preserves all the important, relevant content. In a WikiWiki, it is usually discussions that are refactored--with the purpose of making the discussion accessible to someone who is interested in the arguments made in the discussion, and the information to be gleaned from it, rather than the history of the discussion itself. Refactoring is critically important process in developing and maintaining the Wikipedia.
Obviously, refactoring is difficult to do in such a way that will make all participants in a discussion happy. It requires intelligence, tact, excellent reading comprehension skills, good writing skills, and a lack of bias.
Several good discussions are found at the WikiWeb at c2.org (http://c2.org).
For policy on refactoring in Wikipedia, see editing policy. In the context of Wikipedia, usually talk pages are refactored, but occasionally, when an article has been developed in a particularly haphazard way, it needs to be changed so radically that the resulting change can be called a refactoring.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump