Code Refactoring

We used to call it "code clean up", which is something rarely done in our company due to always "tight schedule" and "higher priority" tasks.

Despite the fact that after refactoring the maintainability is much improved, our managers typically do not want to give us a slice of time doing it. The reason behind probably would never be known.

I have a heuristic theory that they are not aware of the importance of software engineering. "Ya, I know that, but ..." is a typical scene you will see when a software engineering advocate proposes something about software engineering to higher ranked staff.

Another good reason is: most of our managers have hardware background instead of software. They wrote some 8051, hello world stuff in their colleages or universities and that is "the software" in their mind. The only difference is we are dealing with more lines of code.

I will stop pouring my complaint for now. This is the short definition of code refactoring:

Code refactoring is the process of changing a computer program's internal structure without modifying its external functional behavior or existing functionality, in order to improve internal non-functional properties of the software, for example to improve code readability, to simplify code structure, to change code to adhere to a given programming paradigm, to improve maintainability, or to improve extensibility.