RE: RPG naming

Tony, it would be great if this is what actually happens during
"refactoring", but that's rarely the case.  According to the precise
description, you are NOT allowed to change contracts, which means no
changes to interfaces at all, no changes to signatures, and so on.

Unfortunately, the name has been "appropriated" to mean anything that is
required to get the code to work properly, which can include anything
from a small internal mod to adding entire classes.

It's not the CONCEPT of refactoring that I have a problem with, it's the
imprecise use of the term.  Just like CDI (constructor dependency
injection) has been misused to include any time you add a parameter to a
constructor.

Joe



> From: Cate, Tony (Alliance)
> 
> Refactoring is not debugging. Here's a brief descriptin of what it
> is/does:
> 
> Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing
> body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its
> external behavior. Its heart is a series of small behavior preserving
> transformations. Each transformation (called a 'refactoring') does
> little, but a sequence of transformations can produce a significant
> restructuring. Since each refactoring is small, it's less likely to go
> wrong. The system is also kept fully working after each small
> refactoring, reducing the chances that a system can get seriously
broken
> during the restructuring.