Freshen Up Your Codebase: The Essential Guide to Refactoring!

Adhithi Ravichandran
5 min readMar 11, 2024
Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash

Are you thinking about getting on a refactoring task? Do you feel that your code smells, and needs some refactoring? Well, then there are few principles that you can follow to ensure that you are on the right track.

Refactoring code means, restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior. -Martin Fowler

Before we look into some tips for refactoring code, let’s learn about some symptoms of code smell.

What is Code Smell?

A code smell is a problem in the code that is not exactly a bug, but more of a pain point and could result in potential problems. Code smell may commonly occur in large legacy codebases, that did not have recent updates.

According to Martin Fowler, code smells are not problematic on their own. They are warning signals that there might be a real problem in the code.

Practical Examples of Code Smell

Let’s look at some types of code smells that you may encounter in your codebase.

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Adhithi Ravichandran

Software Consultant, Author, Speaker, React|Next.js|React Native |GraphQL|Cypress|Playwright Dev & Indian Classical Musician