Code quality matters. Not everyone writes great code. Some developers keep habits which they learnt when writing code in languages which forced styles (e.g. declaring all variables at the beginning of a function) which are no longer appropriate to the language they are now using.

Some developers think that only the architecture matters and small details like code aren't important. In this interactive tutorial, Mike & Ivan will work (real, live coding!) through a series of small refactoring exercises, each designed to bring out a particular learning point from Ivan's "Programming in the Small" blog series (http://ivan.truemesh.com/archives/cat_programming_in_the_small.html).

Attendees will see that by applying a collection of quite small scale refactorings, code ends up being significantly easier to read and modify. The programming language used will be Java.