Refactoring

up: Programming

Practical refactoring

Practical Refactoring - How to clean code in many small steps

Things to remove:

• Clutter

  • ”Anything in your code that does not add value”
    • Redundant comments
    • Dead code
    • Unneccesary code
  • That makes everything else harder to understand.

• Complexity

  • Bad names
  • Long methods
    • Every method should fit on a screen
    • Find the “seams”¹, and break it into new methods
    • These should be Well-named methods.
  • Deep conditionals
  • Magic numbers/strings
    • Magic numbers, if required, should be in a seperate settings file.

• Cleverness

  • Make it clear. Make it elegant. Make it easy to read. Clever is going to bite you later.
  • If it needs a comment, it’s clever.

• Duplication

  • Extract repeated statements into methods

Footnotes

1. Usually curly-braches, like if expressions. This is similar to the Extract Conditional Pattern. ↩