Book Image

Agile Technical Practices Distilled

By : Pedro M. Santos, Marco Consolaro, Alessandro Di Gioia
Book Image

Agile Technical Practices Distilled

By: Pedro M. Santos, Marco Consolaro, Alessandro Di Gioia

Overview of this book

The number of popular technical practices has grown exponentially in the last few years. Learning the common fundamental software development practices can help you become a better programmer. This book uses the term Agile as a wide umbrella and covers Agile principles and practices, as well as most methodologies associated with it. You’ll begin by discovering how driver-navigator, chess clock, and other techniques used in the pair programming approach introduce discipline while writing code. You’ll then learn to safely change the design of your code using refactoring. While learning these techniques, you’ll also explore various best practices to write efficient tests. The concluding chapters of the book delve deep into the SOLID principles - the five design principles that you can use to make your software more understandable, flexible and maintainable. By the end of the book, you will have discovered new ideas for improving your software design skills, the relationship within your team, and the way your business works.
Table of Contents (31 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1
7
Section 2
13
Section 3
19
Section 4
25
Chapter 21
28
License: CyberDojo

Chapter 6

Design 2 – Refactoring

Refactor: not because you know the abstraction, but because you want to find it.

– Martin Fowler

Refactoring, for me, used to mean something like, "Let me bring the bulldozer and fix all this code." I remember spending nights breaking everything apart, changing the design, and then bringing it all together again. In this process, I would easily have hundreds of tests failing while I was changing the design. This was what I called refactoring. Then, one day, I read a tweet saying something like, "Refactoring is about changing the design without changing the behavior, and it can only happen if tests are passing all the time."

After digesting the message of that tweet, I started to practice refactoring that way. I tried to use it on projects, but it led to frustration as I was too inexperienced to use it in real code. With time and more practice, I finally got to a point where I could do it. I could...