Martin Fowler chats about the work he’s done over the last couple of years on the rewrite of the original Refactorings book. He discusses how this thought process has changed and how that’s affected the new edition of the book. In addition to discussing Refactors, Martin and Wes discuss his thoughts on evolutionary architecture, team structures, and how the idea of refactors can be applied in larger architecture contexts.

Why listen to this podcast:

- Refactoring is the idea of trying to identify the sequence of small steps that allows you to make a big change. That core idea hasn’t changed.

- Several new refactorings in the book deal with the idea of transforming data structures into other data structures, Combine Functions into Transform for example.

- Several of the refactorings were removed or not added to the book in favor of adding them to a web edition of the book.

- A lot of the early refactorings are like cleaning the dirt off the glass of a window. You just need them to be able to see where the hell you are and then you can start looking at the broader ones.

- Refactorings can be applied broadly to architecture evolution. Two recent posts How to break a Monolith into Microservices, by Zhamak Dehghani, and How to extract a data-rich service from a monolith by Praful Todkar on MartinFowler.com deal with this specifically.

- Evolutionary architecture is a broad principle that architecture is constantly changing. While related to Microservices, it’s not Microservices by another name. You could evolve towards or away from Microservices for example.

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