Defining Refactoring

If someone says their code was broken for a couple days while they were refactoring, you can be pretty sure they were not refactoring

• The term "refactoring" is often used very loosely by practitioners to mean any kind of code cleanup.

• Refactoring is about applying small behavior-preserving steps and making a big change by stringing together a sequence of these behavior-preserving steps.

• During this process, code should NOT spend much time in a broken state.

Refactoring (noun):

a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without changing observable behavior.

Refactoring (verb):

to restructure software by applying a series of refactorings without changing its observable behavior.

Restructuring (verb):

a general term to mean any kind of reorganizing or cleaning up of a code base that includes refactoring.

Refactoring is always done to make the code easier to understand and cheaper to modify.