Refactoring is a process of re-writing or re-organizing text or code. The purpose of a refactor is to make the code or text more understandable and readable while exactly preserving its meaning and behavior.
The concept of refactoring originated in the Smalltalk community because the Smalltalk IDE tools allow refactoring steps to be carried out in a consistent way comparatively easy.
Refactoring definition at the Content Creation wiki
Takeaway for example
"Refactoring is typically done in small steps. After each small step, you're left with a working system that's functionally unchanged."
