>But that sounds real dangerous if the true process of refactoring is employed.
>I say this because my understanding is that you change a bit of code THEN TEST IT then move on to the next bit of code. What you describe seems far too 'powerful' and certainly not in keeping with small bits at a time.

I'll be honest - I do most of my refactoring while I'm actively building some chunk of code or actively in the process of enhancing it to add new functionality or to fix problems. Testing it is implied since I'm actively still developing it. I expect to make major changes to the code at that point in development.

Once something is working and has been in production for a while, I'm a lot more careful about making smaller changes for exactly the reasons you describe. However, renaming a variable or extracting code out to a method is far less like to break code when using a tool like R!/CodeRush along with a strongly-typed language. The tool makes sure it's really reflected everywhere and the compile finds anything else stupid I may have done. In VFP you definitely must be more careful about what you're doing since even a simple variable rename can break code (that you wouldn't notice until you ran the code). I wouldn't even consider "simple" cleanup in VFP without testing each and every change.