Refactoring is the most abused term

I was directed towards this article today and it reminded me of a personal rant of mine that I need to share.

Refactoring was a term made famous by Martin Fowler's book.  None of the refactorings discussed in that book are very complex.  The whole point is that the changes made can be proven to make no change to the functionality of the program.  These refactorings can be chained together to create significantly different code base but there is a chain of incremental changes rather than a rework.

How many times have you heard people say they wish to refactor the code base to reduce technical debt but what they really mean is to redesign it?  Redesign is not Refactoring!  They are different words and they have different meanings, don't abuse them!