Re: Ambiguous Refactoring Solution

Very good point. [And a reminder to myself, not to speak in absolutes! ]. Sometimes it's better, and more importantly, faster to rely on manual tests to get to a better design. 
I have to say, though, it's not a piece of advice I'd give to 'younger' developers; cause I know that they'd understand 'sometimes' to mean 'almost always, if you need to'. 
Thanks, point taken.

/h






 




    
                  >

> 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



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Joshua Kerievsky

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