I wanted to share this article because I think it's a mistake in distinction that people make frequently. Accurately labeling a project as a "refactor" or "redesign" makes an important difference in understanding the effort and scope of those projects from the very beginning. It should be kept in mind that the goal of refactoring is to rewrite underlying implementation in a way that simplifies its maintainability and reusability without changing the functional aspects and contracts with integration points (e.g., shouldn't break existing unit tests), whereas a redesign can change both functionality and implementation entirely.
Refactoring and Redesigning are Different by Johanna Rothman
posted on March 25th, 2011 at 2:42 pm
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