"Because the assumption is that refactoring will be a few hours' work, or even shorter if it's renaming a class here and replacing a file there. These are only

"Because the assumption is that refactoring will be a few hours' work, or even shorter if it's renaming a class here and replacing a file there. These are only the most superficial cases of refactoring, however..." That always bothers me, too. The changes you can make continuously are hardly worth bothering to worry about, because they're so small and quick and decent developers will do them automatically. It's the changes that take several days or a week that really make the difference in the long term.