What is refactoring?

Refactoring is altering the internal organization of software to make it more understandable and less expensive to modify, without changing its observable behavior. Refactoring brings many benefits to the code quality of the software, and multiple challenges are solved for developers in agile projects by continuously refactoring the code.

Why is refactoring necessary?

Refactoring improves the maintainability and comprehension of code by altering its internal organization without changing its behavior. It helps the team’s engineers maintain control over complexity. We can implement an agile process while maintaining a robust refactoring culture. Instead of excessive preparation and fear of change, we want to promote experimentation and simple solutions. To achieve that, we must continuously enhance the code with little modifications.

Advantages of refactoring

Here are some advantages of refactoring software:

• It improves the quality of the software.
• It maintains the architecture of the software.
• It optimizes the code of the software.
• It diminishes technical debt.
• It allows us to reshare a more optimized version of the code.
• It provides readable and modular code.
• It involves less memory consumption.
• It encourages collective ownership in the team.

Challenges of refactoring

The following are a few challenges that are mostly seen in agile projects.

• The time constraint is the biggest challenge for refactoring in agile projects in an already defined set of deliverables.
• When the code has no error, developers usually don’t think to optimize it because of the error-free output. However, refactoring involves continously enhancing the code to optimize it.
• Integrating the code across different components post-refactoring is considered a major challenge.
• If automated test suites are unavailable, the developer is prevented from refactoring, with the additional effort of manually testing to check the functionality.