Notes for Code & Coffee on 7/23/2021

Topic for 7/23: POP QUIZ:  Name a few code smells

• Identified smells:
• Player 1 - (anonymized players in case they prefer it that way)
• Overused singleton
• Overly complex test code (to get 100% coverage)
• test private ctor throws exception (Bruce’s example)
• Side effects
• Pushing to a dev branch that hasn’t been green in three months
• Broken builds
• See also disabled tests
• Player 2
• Lack of type safe code in Java
• extra tests required to assert types
• Git commit messages that just tell exactly what was done
• maybe useful maybe not
• “Undoing last commit”
• For better commits try:
• Arlo’s git notation
• https://github.com/RefactoringCombos/ArlosCommitNotation
• R!! rewrote everything
• Lack of tooling support (gitlab stinks, git log ftw)
• Do it intra story, then squash and merge
• Make it easy to make the change (this may be hard) then make the easy change (Kent Beck)
• Player 3
• Shotgun surgery
• Making one change causes need to change in other places
• Feature envy
• Got a function doing work and needs or over uses collaborators
• Long methods
• Badly named variables
• Player 4
• Inconsistent IDE linting settings.
• What to do about code smells
• “When I was at x-company that was our job”
• 2 million line code base
• 30% dead code
• 20% duplicate code
• Copy/Paste coding
• Aggressively adding huge amounts of dead code
• Removed dead code and worthless comments
• 5000 loc -> 400 loc (extreme case)
• Nothing makes me happier than deleting code
• Eclipse and Intellij
• if statements that explicitly compare against true or false.
• little t true and big true and other notes I missed
• Do some uncomfortable low risk cleanups
• Links:
• “Get a whiff of this” - Sandi Metz:
• About refactoring and code smells
• Recorded talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJjHfa5yxlU
• Slides from the talk: https://speakerdeck.com/skmetz/get-a-whiff-of-this
• See slide 6 for the “Classic Smells”
• Slide 10 & 11 take and organize them into categories
• This looks interesting but have not tried it:
• https://sandimetz.com/99bottles
• Smells to refactorings cheatsheet:
• https://www.industriallogic.com/blog/smells-to-refactorings-cheatsheet/
• https://www.industriallogic.com/img/blog/2005/09/smellstorefactorings.pdf