Reduce, Reuse, Refactor
Refactoring is the art of improving the design of existing code. When we have an application that continues to produce revenue, it’s almost always better to reduce, reuse, and refactor, rather than throwing away the old code and starting anew. We’ll learn specific techniques, approaches, and code smells. We’ll see that our IDE can handle simple refactorings such as Extract Method. We’ll use our test suite to ensure that functionality did not change as a result of the refactoring. We’ll gain the habit of refactoring to make our code more expressive and therefore more easily understood after time has passed. Martin Fowler notes that the code we write today is merely tomorrow’s legacy code. Let’s make it as easy as we can on our future selves.