Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

Preface

Once upon a time, a consultant made a visit to a development project in order to look at some of the code that had been written. As he wandered through the class hierarchy at the center of the system, the consultant found it rather messy. The higher-level classes made certain assumptions about how the classes would work—assumptions that were embodied in inherited code. That code didn’t suit all the subclasses, however, and was overridden quite heavily. Slight modifications to the superclass would have greatly reduced the need to override it. In other places, an intention of the superclass had not been properly understood, and behavior present in the superclass was duplicated. In yet other places, several subclasses did the same thing ...