>Refactoring happens because the model of the world that the software works with has changed since the software has been implemented. Maybe the way users and ro

>Refactoring happens because the model of the world that the software works with has changed since the software has been implemented. Maybe the way users and roles are represented was kinda OK 5 years ago, but the world (== business environment, understanding, requirements) has changed since. So the code that has been OK 5 years ago is painfully mismatched with the present. Totally agreed. This is a practical reason for it. But much of refactoring doesn't happen because of this. The article says you should refactor all the time for "better" code. It's not talking about your use case where you have to update dependencies, security features and things like that.