Refactoring
Restructuring code improving internal quality without changing external behavior. Refactoring reduces complexity and improves maintainability.
Real World
Twitter's engineering team refactored their monolithic Ruby on Rails codebase into smaller, independent Java services, improving reliability from 80% uptime during peak events to 99.9% without changing any user-facing features.
Exam Focus
State explicitly that refactoring does not change external behaviour — this distinction is worth marks and often missed.
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