[Chicago-talk] refactoring literature

Steven Lembark lembark at wrkhors.com
Mon Mar 22 19:22:23 CST 2004


> I've been reading Fowler's Refactoring book off and on for the past few
> months, and its focus on moving from OO that smells bad to OO that smells
> nice  and clean is really interesting, but leaves me feeling a bit lost
> when it  comes to refactoring stinky procedural code.

His first step would be to make all of it OO. A problem
with all the UML authors is that they don't seem to believe
any non-OO code really exists (or is worth considering).

Much of his smell test can be applied to procedural code,
the main trick is to look at what gets shifted around w/in
the OO portion and ask where similar data structures are
in your procedural code. It always helps me to remember
that the code will never be better than its data structures
and ask if the structs are clean -- however they are accessed.

Another approach is to treat all OO code as procedural at
SOME level (something runs in steps) and ask what the low(er)
level OO stuff looks like before/after refactoring. Those
same places will be good places to look for improvements in
procedural code.


--
Steven Lembark                               2930 W. Palmer
Workhorse Computing                       Chicago, IL 60647
                                            +1 888 359 3508



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