Topic 40
Refactoring

Change and decay in all around I see...

H. F. Lyte, Abide With Me

As a program evolves, it will become necessary to rethink earlier decisions and rework portions of the code. This process is perfectly natural. Code needs to evolve; it's not a static thing.

Unfortunately, the most common metaphor for software development is building construction. Bertrand Meyer's classic work Object-Oriented Software Construction [Mey97] uses the term “Software Construction,” and even your humble authors edited the Software Construction column for IEEE Software in the early 2000s.[55]

But using construction as the guiding metaphor implies the following steps:

  1. An architect draws up blueprints.

  2. Contractors dig the foundation, build the superstructure, ...

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