QA Refactoring Safety

Use this skill to refactor safely: preserve behavior, reduce risk, and keep CI green while improving maintainability and delivery speed.

Defaults: baseline first, smallest safe step next, and proof via tests/contracts/observability instead of intuition.

Quick Start (10 Minutes)

If key context is missing, ask for: what must not change (invariants), risk level (money/auth/migrations/concurrency), deployment constraints, and the smallest boundary that can be protected by tests.
Confirm baseline: main green; reproduce the behavior you must preserve.
Choose a boundary: API surface, module boundary, DB boundary, or request handler.
Add a safety net: characterization/contract/integration tests at that boundary.
Refactor in micro-steps: one behavior-preserving change per commit/PR chunk.
Prove: run the smallest relevant suite locally, then full CI; keep failures deterministic.