6 Steps To Refactoring Rails (for Mere Mortals) | Engine Yard Blog

6 Steps To Refactoring Rails (for Mere Mortals) | Union Station:

Since December, Rails has undergone a fairly significant internal refactoring in quite a number of areas. While it was quite tricky at first, we mere mortals have started to hone a process for diving into a new area of the codebase and emerging some time later with a much improved area that does basically the same thing. Here’s the approach we’ve adopted and advocate: First, refactoring needs to be refactoring, not revision. By that I mean that while you are in the process of invasively improving some code, it is not the appropriate time to also change the functionality of that code. If you do both at the same time, it will be difficult to track down whether a bug in the code is the result of refactoring or functionality changes. We’ve held fast to this requirement for the Rails 3 work Carl and I have been doing, which has resulted in an extremely stable edge , despite mak...

Full article: http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2009/6-steps-to-refactorin...