NetTuts.com has posted the second part of their "Refactoring Legacy Code" series today continuing on from their beginning of the series. They continue the refactor of their "trivia" application.

Old code. Ugly code. Complicated code. Spaghetti code. Jibberish nonsense. In two words, Legacy Code. This is a series that will help you work and deal with it. We first met our legacy source code in our previous lesson. [...] The time for the first changes have come and what better way to understand a difficult code base than start to extract magic constants and strings into variables? These seemingly simple tasks will give us greater and sometimes unexpected insights into the inner workings of legacy code. We will need to figure out the intentions of the original code author and find the proper names for the pieces of code that we've never seen before.

They talk about refactoring out things like "magic strings" and other hard-coded return values and checks. They mention updating the tests to reflect these changes while keeping an eye out for "magic constants" as well.