Refactoring. It’s a word I hear quite a bit. Usually, in the context of conversations with management, it means, “Rewriting that thing. Hopefully without introducing bugs.” Often, among developers, it means, “One of the options in the Refactoring menu in my IDE.”
Tools vs. Discipline
A tool is not the same thing as a discipline. For example, Jenkins is not Continuous Integration. And just because you’re using Jenkins doesn’t mean you’re practicing CI. You may only be doing “CI Theatre.”
Improve your test writing “Flow.”
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I’m afraid the same is true of refactoring. Just because you use a menu item doesn’t mean you’re refactoring. You may only be doing Refactoring Theatre.
Just because you use a menu item doesn't mean you're refactoring. It may be Refactoring Theatre.
Refactoring Demo Screencast
So here’s a refactoring demo in a 12-minute screencast. In my TDD sample app, I want to move a line of code into a class that doesn’t yet exist. Whenever I run unit tests, I call it out with a “doorbell” sound effect and a text overlay in the upper-right corner. Watch how many times I run my unit tests, and how often.
(Sorry about my choice of sound effect. It's not a delivery at your door!)
I hope my use of AppCode, and calling out the shortcuts I use, doesn’t detract from my message. I’m a big believer in having good tools and using them well. For me, that means I prefer AppCode, which is a keyboard-centric IDE. Despite the shortcuts I use in Xcode, it remains largely mouse-centric.
(AppCode keeps adding refactoring tools. If I were to re-record this, I'd use the automated Change Signature refactoring now available for Swift.)
My goal in this screencast is to pretend that we’re pair programming. That way you can see not just the end result, but the steps I take, and how.
Do You Have the Refactoring Book?
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The Refactoring book completely changed the way I code.
Have you seen this kind of refactoring in your workplace? Please share your experiences in the comments below.
Nice post, Jon!
Alan! Thank you :)
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You hammered it home.
I dislike Xcode’s Refactor menu item. Rename isn’t really refactoring. Extract is just moving code to another function. Those are so low-level. A much higher level thinking is required to architect an app properly, and refactor to improve code.
But Rename Method and Extract Class are important refactorings. What I’m trying to show is the importance of small steps verified by unit tests. The goal is to minimize time “in red”.
Wow, this is like “iterative refactoring”, which is a term I just made up :) I like the idea of refactoring so that the code still works every step of the way, instead of leaving things broken until the end. Thanks for the screencast and post, Jon! This was valuable for me.
Glad you liked it, Vui. It’s unfortunate that the term “refactoring” has been so corrupted. So… welcome to “iterative refactoring”!