What is Specificity of Refactoring?

by Nataliia Vasylyna | June 19, 2015 10:00 am

For the last years refactoring has been often used during software development. Refactoring assumes improving code without changing functions and behavior of the application.

The main goal of it is making the application code clearer, what allows all the project members to understand the application logic.

Web site testing, desktop testing and mobile application testing prove that refactoring helps to enhance the software product architecture and fix unreproducible errors or prevent their appearance.

One Shouldn’t Confuse Refactoring With:

re-engineering of a software product; it means adding new functions or fixing errors that involve serious changes in the software behavior, architecture, functioning;
performance optimization; it means improvement of some operations of the software, making them run faster or consume less memory; performance optimization does not change functions of the program as well as refactoring.

Refactoring always involves automated testing. It is important to have tests that can fast and easily verify whether the improved code works as it should.

Those, who often apply automation during functional testing, performance testing, regression testing, know that isn’t easy to create and maintain good automated tests. Automated tests are a software product and one should make refactoring of them as well. Most of the tests, verifying automated tests, are executed manually.