Whether you’re part of an agile team using methods like XP or Scrum, or processing your projects in a more classic way with RUP or even waterfall, in most cases you’re part of a team of developers. Chances that someday you’ll have to work with or (worse) debug code someone else has written are 100%. And who of us hasn’t complained about having to deal with “the mess” someone else has made. And probably some of our co-workers have been scratching their heads with both hands looking at some piece of code we’ve written after midnight with a numb mind in shipping hell. Nobody’s perfect.
So what can we do about this situation? Whining, complaining and pointing fingers won’t make the code any better.
Just recently I read “Clean Code” by Robert C. Martin. Zillions of blog entries were recommending this book, so I had to get it myself. I was probably one the last people on earth who hadn’t read it. It’s a great piece of programming literature. Reading it I found myself nodding my head a lot, agreeing with many of the points made and regretted I hadn’t read it earlier. There are some aspects I do not agree with 100% but they were very few.
One thing that impressed me a lot because of its simpleness is the “boy scout rule”: “Leave the campground cleaner than you found it”. When working with a piece of code, make your changes and commit it a little cleaner to your version control system. Let me give you an example.
I was debugging a class for creating financial charts. The following piece of code was scattered in it with slight variations about 20 times.
The reason I was debugging the class was that the font sizes within the charts did not look right when run on the production environment. Simple change made: remove the hard coded String and the numeric font size, and replace them with constants.
No big deal, but improving the readability and maintainability of the code a little bit. Imagine a whole team following this simple principle. More productivity, less rotten code, better team spirit. And the best thing about it: it’s absolutely free!
Happy coding!
Alex
