What is code refactor and why is it necessary?

The “code refactor” is a term invented first by Martin Fowler in his book Refactoring published in 1999. Refactoring essentially means changing the code base without any change to its behavior – this would generally mean restructuring it for better readability, efficiency, deletion of duplicate or not used functions, the writing of long, smaller management methods.

But why create these problems in the first place, then refact the code? Easier to say than to do. In real life, things are different. While we add more and more features to the code existing in unrealistic deadlines, the old code base begins to become little by little. You may have written double code or incorrect variable names or too many parameters in a function because at that time, you did not have time to look at a granular level.

Why is code refactoring required?

Code refactoring consists in improving the internal structure of the code before becoming disorderly and creating a problem in the future. Code refactoring is important to: saving time and money resources for the future, facilitate bugs to find and correct, improves the design of the system and code, improves the overall performance of the system and finally maintains your clean and effective code for all future updates and reusability.

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What are the techniques of code refactoring?

Code refactor is to improve the internal structure of the code before becoming disorderly and costly to manage. Refactoring seems to be good coding practices, but there are largely six ways to refactor the code.

• Abstraction
• Composition
• Moving features
• Red green refactor
• Simplification

Abstraction

There are two ways to refactor the abstraction: the push and the traction method.

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• The sweater-up method draws the code from a subclass and moves it in the hierarchy to an abstract class or a superclass. This allows less duplication of code and better reusability of all shared attributes or functions.

• The Push-Down method pushes the code of an abstract class or superclass to a subclass for logic which is not reusable or which applies only to a particular subclass.

Composition

The composition is the means of removing large code in manifolds smaller by the extraction or the online approach to do things.

• The extraction approach takes part of an existing method and moves them in a new method. This can be done for huge methods containing different functions, for example, so that each function can have its own autonomous method.

• The online approach replaces a call to a method by the body or the content of the method itself, with the method and then deleted. This generally applies to methods having only a few lines of code and called by a single class, for example.

Moving features

What we mean by “mobile functionalities” is that we move the code linked to various attributes, methods and other features among the classes to reduce dependencies and improve cohesion and readability between classes. This redistribution makes it possible to obtain a more logical and balanced design of the existing code, which facilitates the extension and maintenance of the code in future versions.

Refector-green

This 3 -step process follows these steps:

● During the red phase, developers write tests before writing the code to validate specific behavior or software function. These tests are initially intended to fail because the code has not yet been created.

● In the green phase, the programmers write the required code to pass the behavior or the specified function of the test cases. It can be the minimum code required to pass the tests, because the objective here is the speed on quality.

● Finally, the refactor phase is when refinement occurs, providing all the necessary improvements for a cleaner, clearer and more efficient code while preserving its behavior and passing all related tests.

Simplification

The objective here is to simplify code and logic. This can be in the form of a reduction in the number of parameters in a method, to rename too long variables or methods, combining conditional expressions which lead to the same result and decoupling of complex conditional fragments.

AI applications for code refactoring

AI applications can be used today to help the code refactoring process. Refactoring Code Applications fed by Great language models (LLMS) Can analyze complex or enormous code bases and understand semantics and the context behind them and recreate them with multiple recommendations to rebuild the old code.

I hope you have found this useful refactor post, thank you for reading!

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