I had to spend some time recatoring some classes, working with Eclipse, a couple of days ago. I selected some code inside a long method, and went for an "
extract method" refactoring. Good surprise! The IDE (I was using Eclipse, but I bet that IntelliJ IDEA has the leading edge here) also checked out the entire file looking for occurrences of the code portion that was cutted and pasted all over the place, and replaced all of the occurrences with the new method (whic was the part I was planning to do afterwards...) the net result was that a 20 minutes operation became a 10 seconds operation.
On al larger scale this has some interesting consequences: if you know what to do (if you have read and understood the first 70 pages of Martin Fowler's Refactoring), refactoring a large amount of crappy code is a lot easier that you might think, so its worth doing it in many more situations. To be effective you must anyway be confident on your team OOP capabilities, and on their IDE power user skills, being the former much more important - and harder to achieve - than the latter.
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