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Reasons Not to Refactor

Refactoring is great and most developers should refactor more, but there are times when it is not appropriate. Ironically, if you’re aware of these, you may find yourself refactoring even more often than before.

Knowledge of how each species behaves was contained in a single line but is now split up over the entire method. This is the basis of Michael Feather’s process for identifying good refactoring targets(spoiler: code that is complex and changes often is the best place to look). If we’ve been working in small low-risk steps the way that the refactoring community encourages, the tidying we did already was either valuable and should be kept, or is really safe and easy to revert.

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