Practical Refactoring

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Refactoring is easy; the theories have been written and even automated in your tools. Yet many of us still have to work every day with ugly code and large amounts of technical debt. When faced with large code bases, we feel unable to begin and often fall back to the old excuse “that won’t work here.”

It’s time to get real. We are going to take a 300 line ball of mud, and show some new approaches and techniques so that you can actually start using those automated refactorings in your IDE to start safely changing your code little by little. We will demonstrate:

* How to act without understanding the code
* Effective orders to act on code (do these before these)
* Emergent Design
* Small steps
* How to refactor without needing permission or budget

As we go through the code understanding will emerge as well as a sense of calm and empowerment. We are going to be proving that every 2 minutes we have slightly better code, and that those series of small improvements will add up to massively better code.

Overall, this will give a preview into what the effect of small daily improvements looks like over a few months of a much larger project, so you can see how starting on the path of continuous improvement will impact your own project at work.