Therapeutic Refactoring, by Katrina Owen

Enter deadline center stage, exit best practices, quietly, rear stage left.

The results are rarely pretty.

Refactoring can pry panic’s fingers away from your poor, overburdened adrenal glands and restore your sanity. Not that it went missing, of course. Never that!

This talk begins with a patch of impenetrable, undocumented, and untested code, and explores in detail the process of locking down behavior using characterization tests. A dramatic transformation of the code is achieved through the sequential application of numerous tiny refactorings. No stress. No hacking. No rewrite necessary.

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