I hear the word refactoring everywhere. Any programming tool has some blah-blah about how it helps refactoring, every programmer or a manager will tell me something about refactoring. But to me it still sounds like a magic word without any meaning. It seems that refactoring is just editing your code or what?
Wikipedia quote
Code refactoring is a "disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior",[1] undertaken in order to improve some of the nonfunctional attributes of the software. Advantages include improved code readability and reduced complexity to improve the maintainability of the source code, as well as a more expressive internal architecture or object model to improve extensibility.
WHAT? Does every(any)body understand this? Are all those people who talk to me about refactoring, really do mean this?
And why is the name? What's "factoring" then?
