Refactoring practice

Refactoring is redesigning existing or new codes to improve them. Refactoring makes the codes more understandable, structured, clean, and, most importantly, extendable/flexible in the future. Accounting to the ISO/IEC 25010:2011 talks about software quality; refactoring is the technique of changing codes without changing external behaviour to improve maintainability. The software development sector is dynamic, and user requirements are frequently changing. Developers keep changing the codes to meet the customer requirements. These changes cause redundant and unused codes, overloaded classes, and long methods. As a result, the code becomes jumbled, referred to as Smelly code, and is a sign of a more significant problem in software development. Refactoring comes in to correct/eliminate these smelling codes. The developers apply the refactoring techniques by keeping an eye open on the SOLID principles.

SOLID is an acronym for five core object-oriented programming and design introduced in the early 2000s aims to help the development team write standardized codes; clean, easy to read, and extensible.  The researcher argues that it is like cleaning the kitchen after dinner. The more you clean, the more the next dinner will come early. 

Since the agile methodology allows customers to change their requirements anytime during the development process, it is a noble idea for the development team to design and develop software that is flexible/extendable enough to accept these changes without losing more time, budget, and energy. The following are a few examples of refactoring techniques.

Extract class

If you have a class doing the two-class work, you make another class and move the appropriate methods and fields from the original class to the new class.  A class overloaded with methods is intended to perform more than one task, which is difficult to understand and violates the single responsibility principle. The extract class technique is accomplished by creating a new class and then moving some of the methods to the new class so that the original class and the new class each handle a single task. The benefit of this refactoring is that adding or removing features to one of these classes does not affect the whole program. We do this to ensure the maintainability of these classes.

Pull up field

Pull similar fields from subclasses to the superclass to generalize and remove the delicate data declaration.

These refactoring techniques help to develop software with the ability to change anytime. With agile methods, it’s recommended to apply the refactoring techniques to have a project that accepts customer changes during and after the development process. More for refactoring, you can check on refactoring guru.