Developers working on a project will often rethink and recode the software under construction to make its design cleaner and more elegant. Known as "refactoring," this process is done for all sorts of reasons: to facilitate the addition of new features, to improve maintainability, and (or) to increase performance. Refactoring is an important and useful software process.
Refactor enough times though, and you will begin to learn things that you can do when building new software to reduce the amount of refactoring later in the process. Taking these lessons-learned and applying them on subsequent development projects is a process that Ken Pugh refers to as "prefactoring".
This practical, thought-provoking guide details prefactoring guidelines in design, code, and testing, each derived from the lessons of many developers over the years. By following these guidelines, you're far more likely to create more readable and maintainable code than would otherwise be the case.