Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)

by Fowler Martin

In my view refactoring is not an activity you set aside time to do. Refactoring is something you do all the time in little bursts. You don’t decide to refactor, you refactor because you want to do something else, and refactoring helps you do that other thing.

Whenever I have to think to understand what the code is doing, I ask myself if I can refactor the code to make that understanding more immediately apparent.