Is it bad to have an "Obsessive Refactoring Disorder"?

Posted by Rachel on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Rachel
Published on 2011-02-04T13:51:03Z Indexed on 2011/02/04 15:33 UTC
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I was reading this question and realized that could almost be me. I am fairly OCD about refactoring someone else's code when I see that I can improve it. For example, if the code contains duplicate methods to do the same thing with nothing more than a single parameter changing, I feel I have to remove all the copy/paste methods and replace it with one generic one.

Is this bad? Should I try and stop? I try not to refactor unless I can actually make improvements to the code performance or readability, or if the person who did the code isn't following our standard naming conventions (I hate expecting a variable to be local because of the naming standard, only to discover it is a global variable which has been incorrectly named)

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