Code Refactoring

Code refactoring is a process and a set of techniques for improving the internal structure of your code without changing its behavior. Refactoring deals with making the code easier to read, work with, maintain and extend. It can help to improve the code's efficiency and, potentially, resolve some issues.

The refactoring techniques involve applying different cumulative small changes (mini-refactorings) to the code. Individually, each mini-refactoring is small enough to reduce the risk of introducing any errors, but collectively, refactoring can significantly enhance your code.

Visual COBOL provides support for refactoring of COBOL code using the following techniques:

• Renaming COBOL elements to improve their readability or make their purpose clearer. You can rename variables and identifiers as well as section and paragraph names.You can choose to change all or selected occurrences of a name and the changes will apply to the names in the files from the current workspace
• Moving selected lines of code into a copybook to help with code reuse.