refactoring

The idea of Inline Method Refactoring is simple – replace a method call with its contents. Still, it is really powerful. But to appreciate its power, you need to know its use cases. Let’s understand why, when, and how to apply the Inline Method refactoring and how IntelliJ IDEA can help you get started. (more…)

As a code base ages, new code is added, and the existing code is modified to meet the business requirements. This can often have a negative impact on the design and structure of the code. Developers may fear working with such code as it is difficult to understand, modify, or extend. As a developer, you can take redundancy and complexity out of your code, by refactoring it. Refactoring is the process of improving your source code without creating any new functionality. It helps you keep your code SOLID, DRY, and easy to maintain. Even though clean code bases and code refactoring is crucial (

Or: argh! Where do I start?! This is part of a series investigating code that looks suspicious ("code smells"), and exploring possible alternatives. Code Smells: Null Code Smells: Deeply Nested Code Code Smells: Iteration Code Smells: Mutation Code Smells: Multi-Responsibility Methods Code Smells: If Statements Code Smells: Too Many Problems For the middle articles of this series, we've been focusing on a single method, and demonstrating how to improve this method, one smell at a time.  While it has been… useful… that a single method has demonstrated so many smells, if yo

This is part of a series investigating code that looks suspicious ("code smells"), and exploring possible alternatives. Code Smells: Null Code Smells: Deeply Nested Code Code Smells: Iteration Code Smells: Mutation Code Smells: Multi-Responsibility Methods Code Smells: If Statements Code Smells: Too Many Problems The article in this series that has so far provoked the most responses was on iteration. Today, I'm talking about if statements (conditionals). I'm not intending to go after any sacred cows or anything – for loops and if statements are pretty much the first things w

This is part of a series investigating code that looks suspicious ("code smells"), and exploring possible alternatives. Code Smells: Null Code Smells: Deeply Nested Code Code Smells: Iteration Code Smells: Mutation Code Smells: Multi-Responsibility Methods Code Smells: If Statements Code Smells: Too Many Problems In the last article I introduced a large and complex method, validateQuery.  The focus of that article was how to simplify the method looking only at the "smell" of mutability, but there's actually one very simple change that can chop the method nearly in half.

This is part of a series investigating code that looks suspicious ("code smells"), and exploring possible alternatives. Code Smells: Null Code Smells: Deeply Nested Code Code Smells: Iteration Code Smells: Mutation Code Smells: Multi-Responsibility Methods Code Smells: If Statements Code Smells: Too Many Problems In the article about deeply nested code I wanted to change getMappedField to return an Optional value. The change to the method was fairly trivial, the change to the code that calls that method... well, that turned out to be another matter altogether. (more&hell

This is part of a series investigating code that looks suspicious ("code smells"), and exploring possible alternatives. Code Smells: Null Code Smells: Deeply Nested Code Code Smells: Iteration Code Smells: Mutation Code Smells: Multi-Responsibility Methods Code Smells: If Statements Code Smells: Too Many Problems During my research on refactoring I've seen a number of patterns (smells) crop up again and again. None of these are particularly new, and there are plenty of books, blogs and videos that cover smells and how to deal with them, but I wanted to demonstrate some speci

Many of the features we're going to talk about in this post have been mentioned elsewhere in this blog, but here we're going to bring them all together and show how to use them. Better Warnings You'll have seen before that IntelliJ IDEA can analyse your code and tell you if something isn't needed, or perhaps doesn't make sense.  IntelliJ IDEA 2017.2 has even better analysis in several areas.  The first we're going to look at is Control Flow Analysis - IntelliJ IDEA can look at the logic in your code and tell you if certain cases just won't occur. For example, if a Collection or String

Last week we had two exciting events: IntelliJ IDEA 2016.2 Public Preview announcement, and a webinar in which Bill Wake gave a one-hour masterclass on refactoring with IntelliJ IDEA. The preview is definitely worth a try, so please help yourself to it (don't forget to share your feedback, of course.) As for the webinar, you're welcome to watch its recording any time: https://youtu.be/ITXgUB2GrLY Sources of the original Gilded Rose application can be found on GitHub, as are sources of the same application after all the refactoring. To learn more about refactoring code and IntelliJ IDEA, read

Join us Thursday, June 16th, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT (New York) / 18:00 – 19:00 CEST (Berlin) (check other time zones) for our free live webinar Refactoring with IntelliJ IDEA, featuring Bill Wake, a senior consultant with Industrial Logic and an author for several books, on XP, refactoring and design patterns. In this webinar Bill will refactor the Gilded Rose application using IntelliJ IDEA, with its great refactoring tools and coding assistant capabilities. Along the way, you’ll learn some handy IntelliJ IDEA techniques. In this session, you’ll see the Paradox of Duplication in action: incre