Source Control Smells? I was reading through some code the other day, and I came across a class that made me shutter a little. Interestingly, it wasn’t a code smell or a name smell. I wasn’t looking at the class itself, and it had an innocent enough name. It was a source control smell. I…
Writing maintainable code is for “Code Monkeys”? This morning, I read an interesting blog post from Erik McClure. The premise of the post is that writing maintainable code is sufficiently boring and frustrating as to discourage people from the programming profession. A few excerpts from the post are: There is an endless stream of rheteric…
Finding Seams in Code The other day, someone asked me about how to “get at” certain things that he wanted to unit test in a class that he was writing. That is, he had some code that he wanted to extract from a public method and test, but his only solution was to expose the…
Don’t Generate Compiler Warnings I was doing some work this morning when I received a general email to a group of developers for a large project that sort of pleaded with and sort of demanded that members of the group not check in code that generated compiler warnings. And, I agree with that. Although, with…
Name Smells Revisited A long time ago, I blogged about a concept I dubbed “name smells”. Among other things that I described making me wary of a piece of code just by its name were the words “Helper” and “Manager” in a class name. My issue with this was and is that this tends to…
