Question

I’ve never used refactoring before (though I’ve seen the button through an Eclipse dropdown menu), and while I’ve read the Wikipedia page of what it does, it still doesn’t provide me with a concrete visual example of how it’s done (of course I know that it’s some way to automatically make code more organized).

Answer 1

Refactoring is not automatic 😉 Most of the time its being done by hand, yet there are tools for automating simple edits.

How it looks ?
JavaScript example:

var myArray = new Array();
myArray[0] = "apples";
myArray[1] = "bananas";
myArray[2] = "carrots";

becomes

var fruits = [ "apples", "bananas", "carrots" ];

For more complex stuff, look at Martin Fowler’s example: http://codecourse.sourceforge.net/materials/Refactoring-A-First-Example.rtf