I’ve recently been introduced to refactoring code. It’s basically cleaning it up, making it more readable, and matching logic. High level blocks of code should be together and call mid level blocks of code, which should be grouped and call low level blocks of code (which would be the most detailed code). Naming should be intuitive, and so forth.
Refactoring is an essential part of the software development cycle, so I’ve decided to start paying more attention to it.
If you are like me and you’re just discovering this topic, there are some great screencasts available to give a clear idea of what it is. These are examples of code refactoring in Ruby using a plugin for Eclipse and can be found at http://r2.ifs.hsr.ch/trac/wiki/Screencasts. As I find more resources I’ll post them here. Until then here are a few other links I found useful: