Code Smells

Code Smells

• What are they?
  • Signs that your code can be made better
  • Things you should look for when doing a code review
  • Learned from practical experience
  • There are many lists, this is mine of the top ones
  • They are not hard-and fast
• The smells
  • Large class: Class longer than 100 or so lines
  • Large method: Method longer than 10 lines or so
  • Long parameter list: methods with 4 or more parameters
  • Single Responsiblity Violations: Class, methods should do one thing
  • Global variables: Almost always a very bad sign
  • Bad Name: Non descriptive or very short variable names
  • Unnecessary complexity: Nested conditionals (ifs and case) are questionable
  • Feature envy: A class that uses methods of another class exessively

Exercxise for teams

• Set up each of your computers with rubocop
• Do a code review of each of your mazes submissions (don’t believe rubocop)
• Make a list of the code smells you see (including some not mentioned on my list)
• Discuss some specific changes you would make to remove smells
• We will discuss that after 20 minutes of team work.