When Refactoring Doesn't Work

by Jens Coldewey

One of the basic assumptions of agile development is that design and -- to a certain extent -- architecture evolve over time. The key difference between a piece of completely entangled software that has been maintained to death and software that has grown in an agile manner is refactoring, the art of improving the design of an existing system without changing its functionality. Based on Bill Opdyke's research in the early 1990s, refactoring is one of the key practices today that distinguish the successful agile approach from the mostly failed rapid application development of the past decade.

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When Refactoring Doesn't WorkThu Nov 22 08:12:42 CDT 2006