Stupid Question 99: Should developers use refactoring tools?

Great video Iris. You're so right about installing the refactoring tools and just using them rather than looking at the settings etc. - something i'm guilty of! 

Refactoring tools are cool, but can be terribly bad if you misuse them. Some might argue that you can actually can learn a thing or two with these. I did, and I've used the same language for 10+ years. Bottom line, test one or two! Some are really annoying, some are less annoying. 

When you are hired as a contractor/consultant to work with legacy code, which usually is a jumbled mess of varying styles and of mixed quality, a refactoring tool saves a ton of time and effort. 

Building software is basically the successive addition of layers and functionality. Code that works is not generally "thrown away", it is generally "re-wrapped" or "moved to another layer".

Given that most of us work on existing systems rather than new systems. Most of us are constantly moving and re-wrapping existing code.

So should we use a re-factoring tool? yes A good re-factoring tool will help you do most of your job. (note the use of the word "good")

Obviously, you don't want to use "bad" re-factoring tools, or tools that do things the "wrong way". But when it comes to tool selection, why would you want a worse tool?