Re: Ambiguous Refactoring Solution

>
> It's true that we 'occasionally' have to resort to doing a particular
> refactoring without the benefit of a test. I would guess that you've come
> across this idea from reading Feather's book, where he discusses 'seams'. I
> think he made the point, that it's rare and comes about when you can't
> figure out a reasonable way to write a focused test first.  I can count the
> times I've had to resort to that; it would be sloth on my part if it
> happened more often.
>

Hi Hal,

I'm not so sure. Some folks I respect a good deal recently encountered
legacy code that was really poorly designed.  They knew how to write tests
for it.  Yet they felt that writing such tests would only couple the tests
to a very poor design.  They decided to refactor first, sans tests, manually
test that all was ok, then write the tests against the newly refactored.  I
think that was likely a sensible path to take in that situation.

-- 
best regards,
jk

Industrial Logic, Inc.
Joshua Kerievsky
Founder, Extreme Programmer & Coach
http://industriallogic.com
866-540-8336 (toll free)
510-540-8336 (phone)
Berkeley, California

Learn Code Smells, Refactoring and TDD at
http://industriallogic.com/elearning


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