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Let's also talk about the cost of refactoring. Refactoring might be

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free or almost free if you're using a tool to do refactoring

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as we did in our demo. But that's not always the

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case. In many cases, refactoring involves quite a bit of manual work

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if you're doing some manual refactoring. And how much that costs

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depends on how well the operations on the source code are supported.

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You might have partial support from an ID. You might have complete

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support, in which case it's greater. Or you might have no support,

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in which case you have to be very careful about

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how you change your code and how you check that you

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didn't change the behavior of the code. There's also an additional

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cost associated with refactoring. Remember

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that refactoring relies heavily on testing

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after each small step of refactoring. So you might have

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to develop test cases, specifically to check your refactoring. And even

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if you have an existing test because, for example, you're working

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some agile context and therefore you develop a lot of UNIX

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test cases before writing your code. And therefore you have a good

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regression test with it you can use every time you modify your code.

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Nevertheless, when you refactor and you change your code, you might need

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to update your test so it's not only the development of the test

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cases but also it's maintaining the test cases. And if you have

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a lot of test cases, you have to maintain more test cases. So

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that's a cost that is not directly visible but can affect quite

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a bit the overall cost of refactoring and the overall cost of system

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development therefore. And finally, you should not

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under estimate the cost of documentation maintenance.

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Applying refactoring may involve changes in interfaces,

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names, for example, names of classes. And

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when you make this kind of changes, you might need to update the documentation,

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and that's also cost. It's something that

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takes effort and therefore should be considered.