Refactoring is about features

Refactoring should always be done in service of a product feature, not for its own sake, according to the article's author, who signs off as Max. Refactoring for its own sake, such as reorganizing unrelated code the author calls "watering the lawn when your house is on fire," gives refactoring a bad name and wastes effort. The article recommends refactoring code right before adding a feature to it, such as splitting a 1000-line function before adding employee sorting by hire date, so that the codebase improves over time. The author also states that this approach usually takes the same or less total time, and reports that his team finished projects faster than teams on newer codebases.