Refactoring

As the popularity of object-oriented programming has grown, the software development community has increasingly faced new problems. Many recent software applications have been developed by less-experienced programmers, resulting in inefficient and difficult-to-maintain programs. Many software professionals have found that it is difficult to work with existing application programs because they have been poorly designed. In response, expert object programmers have been using a growing collection of techniques to improve their performance while working with existing applications. These refinements—known as refactoring—have remained in the domain of experts because no attempt has been made to transcribe this knowledge into a form that all programmers could use…until now.