You guessed it…absolutely nothing. Well at least according to Uncle Bob in his book, Clean Code. Here are some quotable gems: “Comments are, at best, a necessary evil” “The proper use of comments is to compensate for our failure to express ourselves in code.” “Every time you write a comment , you should grimace and [...]
Browsing Posts in Code Quality
Once upon a time, developers fretted over making their code lean and fast. To excel in those days of scarce hardware resources, developers had to master algorithms, outsmart compilers, and perform death defying feats with pointer arithmetic. Oh, how things have changed… Now hard drive space is cheaper than water, memory sticks grow on trees, [...]
As part of the Nothin But .Net training experience, JP Boodhoo encouraged us to try out a few non-standard naming conventions that has adopted recently. The one that intrigued me the most was his convention for naming interfaces. Rather than taking the Microsoft sanctioned approach of adding an I prefix to all interface names, JP [...]
Having a second set of eyes on your code has multiple benefits. Besides increasing the odds of catching bugs earlier in the process when they are less expensive to fix, code reviews tend to yield higher quality code that is more maintainable because you get feedback from someone who has not been immersed in the [...]
I spent some time last week working with Vil, a free code analysis tool that can be used to locate potential quality issues and high risk areas in your code. While working on it, I learned all about various code metrics such as cyclomatic complexity, eCouplings, and LCOM (Lack of Cohesion in Methods) and experimented [...]
In my recent post on code quality, I mentioned some of the high level features of a static analysis tool called NDepend. I’ve been exploring some of the pre-built CQL (Code Query Language) queries in the tool by running them against the WatiN codebase. Here are the results from selecting “Types with Too Many Methods” query. NDepend [...]
Monitoring and enforcing code quality seems to be somewhat of a holy grail in the software industry in that nearly every development shop pursues this goal but few ever even come close to actually achieving it. Here are a few of the common failed approaches I’ve seen: Developer’s Handbook – Despite being a darling of [...]
