Don’t talk about refactoring club.

A long time ago, I linked to this post by Martin Fowler (author of Refactoring), where he lamented at the misuse of the word “refactoring”:

However the term “refactoring” is often used when it’s not appropriate. If somebody talks about a system being broken for a couple of days while they are refactoring, you can be pretty sure they are not refactoring. [This is] restructuring.

For me, refactoring might be part of every PR. My first commit is often a refactoring that makes the rest of the commits easier to do and understand. I might also refactor at the end, but those commits will be squashed before I PR since you don’t need to see how I got there.

In TDD, there’s a specific practice to Red, Green, Refactor your way to working code (or as I do it Green, Refactor, Red) that explicitly thinks of refactoring as a small thing you do often.

The tell to knowing that you are doing refactoring wrong is that you feel like it’s something to talk about. Refactoring, when done well, is about as interesting as variable naming.

It’s not not interesting, but you don’t need to talk about it in a stand-up.