Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code Don Roberts, John Brant, Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, William Opdyke
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional

Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code ▻ 04/11 - 04/18 (6). In that time, many worthwhile books on the matter of refactoring have been brought to my attention. The basic approach involved improving your code's running time by limiting the amount of memory space the program uses. Facing an existing project, you sometimes get confronted with “code that smells”. In my career, a very little portion of the projects I was involved with were based on new code. When you find you have to add a feature to a program, and the program's code is not structured in a convenient way to add the feature, first refactor the program to make it easy to add the feature, then add the feature. [3, 4] In his book on refactoring . Most of them were based on existing code. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, by Fowler et al, Addison-Wesley, 1999. Refactoring is defined as a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior. For instance, RTL refactoring can be used to abstract and understand a design [6], prepare a design for other purposes such as validation or elastization [2], optimize a design for specific tools such as synthesis or to simply improve the design of existing code [3].