And refactoring becomes riskier when practiced informally or ad hoc. You start digging in the code. Soon you discover new opportunities for change, and you dig deeper. The more you dig, the more stuff you turn up. . .and the more changes you make. Eventually you dig yourself into a hole you can’t get out of. To avoid digging your own grave, refactoring must be done systematically. When my coauthors and I wrote Design Patterns, we mentioned that design patterns provide targets for refactorings. However, identifying the target is only one part of the problem; transforming your code so that you
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