November 2018
Intermediate to advanced
448 pages
13h 10m
English
Refactoring is a valuable tool, but it can’t come alone. To do refactoring properly, I need a solid suite of tests to spot my inevitable mistakes. Even with automated refactoring tools, many of my refactorings will still need checking via a test suite.
I don’t find this to be a disadvantage. Even without refactoring, writing good tests increases my effectiveness as a programmer. This was a surprise for me and is counterintuitive for most programmers—so it’s worth explaining why.
If you look at how most programmers spend their time, you’ll find that writing code is actually quite a small fraction. Some time is spent figuring out what ought to be going on, some time is spent designing, but ...
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