Interview With Martin Fowler

Arjen writes "Artima has had a conversation with Martin Fowler, one of the gurus on software development today. It consists of six parts. Parts one, two, three, and four are available now; the rest will appear the next weeks."

Re:Developers love him; Managers hate him

[Spruce Moose]

Refactoring is often about injecting the last good idea you had into working code.

Refactoring isn't about making your project buzzword compliant or supporting distributed OLE-foo++. That's adding new features. From the article:

Martin Fowler: Refactoring is making changes to a body of code in order to improve its internal structure, without changing its external behavior.

Refactoring is usually saying "hey, I implemented that function the wrong way so I'm going to rewrite it properly". The right way of doing something is often obvious after coding it up the wrong way.

allow me to retort!

[tolan-b]

i think you're missing the point here, which is that good refactoring shouldn't affect surrounding code, it's typically about fairly small changes and simplifications.

obviously there will always be some effect, but a proper well written test suite (primarily unit tests, but also higher level tests) should catch the vast majority of cascade effects.

program to the interface and altering the internals shouldn't matter.

oh dear i'm beginning to sound like one of those evangelists!