Michael Feathers on refactoring

Michael Feathers wrote my favorite book on unit testing: Working Effectively with Legacy Code (ISBN 0131177052). Some books on unit testing just give abstract platitudes. Feather’s book wrestles with the hard, messy problem of retrofitting unit tests to existing code.

The .NET Rocks podcast had an interview with Michael Feathers recently. The whole interview is worth listening to, but here I’ll just recap a couple things he said about refactoring that I thought were insightful. First, most people agree that you need to have unit tests in place before you can do much refactoring. The unit tests give you the confidence to refactor without worrying that you’ll break something in the process and not know that you broke it. But Feathers adds that you might have to do some light refactoring before you can put the unit tests in place to allow more aggressive refactoring.

The second thing he mentioned about refactoring was the technique called “scratch refactoring.” With this approach, you refactor quickly without worrying about whether you are introducing bugs in order to see where you want to go. But then you completely throw away those changes and refactor carefully. Sometimes you need to do a dry run first to see what patterns emerge and determine where you want to go.

Both of these observations are ways to break out of a chicken-and-egg cycle, needing to refactor before you can refactor.

One thought on “Michael Feathers on refactoring

  1. Nice post.

    I’m going through this whole process at the moment with the WinROTT game. I’m really frustrated with the problem of circular references and differences in behavior between C and C++. It makes for some long evenings.

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