This has been done before by another mentor, and it was fun. I’ve been watching my use of refactoring tools, and here is my top five list of seven most-used refactorings:

1. Rename
2. Introduce Variable
3. Extract Method
4. Inline variable
5. Inline method
6. Move Method
7. Change method signature

You might guess that I’m doing a fair amount of refactoring on legacy code.

I was suprised how much I’m using introduce/inline variable, but quite often I’m doing that to make a block of code ready for method extraction. Having broken out small methods, I sometimes find a larger method to extract, and then I inline the use of smaller methods. It’s sometimes hard to find the right level of generality.

I’d have trouble imagining that the first three weren’t everyone’s favorite refactorings.