5.2 Is it a Bug or just a Refactoring?

In general when something comes in and you're not sure if you should treat it as a bug or as a refactoring just ask yourself if you need to prevent it from ever happening again. If so, it's a bug (see section sec:Bug-Triage). If not, it's just a refactoring. Maybe a really important refactoring that management wants yesterday, but still...

Text changes are the biggest edge case when it comes to deciding if something is a bug or a refactoring. You see, if it's so important that it must be fixed then it's a bug and you need to prevent it from happening again in the future. Otherwise you're just updating (refactoring) an existing feature. And yes, your textual content is most definitely a feature.

K. Rhodes 2007-05-18