TLDR;

Rector - The Power of Automated Refactoring is now 100% completed

Tomas Votruba and I first met a couple of years ago at one of my favorite conferences; the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam (so actually, we're very close to our anniversary, Tomas!). He presented Rector there and it was really inspiring. A year later I was working on a legacy migration problem: our team wanted to migrate from Doctrine ORM to "ORM-less", with handwritten mapping code, etc. I first tried Laminas Code, a code generation tool, but it lacked many features, and also the precision that I needed. Suddenly I recalled Rector, and decided to give it a try. After some experimenting, everything worked and I learned that this tool really is amazingly powerful!

@ediar asked me on Twitter if I still think a constructor should not be tested. It depends on the type of object you're working with, so I think it'll be useful to elaborate here.

In October 2020 I asked Tomáš Votruba, the mastermind behind Rector, if we could have a little chat about this tool. I wanted to learn more about it and had spent a couple of days experimenting with it. Tomáš answered all my questions, which was tremendously valuable to me personally. When this happens I normally feel the need to share: there should be some kind of artefact that can be published, so others can also learn about Rector and how to extend it based on your own refactoring needs.

I started writing a blog post but never published it, because it was just too much for a post. Creating automated refactorings is a slightly complex topic after all, and it needs a lot of background information for everyone to follow what's going on. So a post was not enough. An alternative would be hours of video recordings, but in my opinion that would just be a waste of everyone's time. In short, this situation actually called for a new book.