I agree Jan..
I just read the blog of Jan Schreuder and I totally agree with him. Actually I also have to get something of my chest. Let me start by dropping the following statement:
Developing software is not about showing to your colleagues or superiors how much extremely complex code you can put in one class. But it is more about in how much scalability, flexibility and maintainability your can put in as little code as possible.
I had the luxury position where I’ve done two projects on a row where the standards were pretty high. This will gave the feeling that overall software development was taken to a higher level. But boy was I wrong… L
The last year or so I descended back in the dark dungeons of software development..
This gave me the feeling that some developers in some parts of the world (no naming or shaming here) are getting paid by the lines of code they produce.
Last year I’ve see thing like:
- A 500 line method to check a date format.. copied to every page it was needed.. but it was already coded in a framework with regular expressions in a couple of lines of code..
- A method with a cyclomatic complexity of 180 (yes Jan it can be worse)..
- A return of the magic number.. What happened to the usage of enumerables ?
- A complete lack of architecture.. I’ve seen display logic in a database and data logic in a UI. I’m not saying everybody has to implement a SOA based architecture, but clear responsibilities would help… a lot ..
- What happened to naming conventions of methods? If I see a method AddObjectAToObjectB(ObjectA) I assume that it adds ObjectA to (a mystery apparently already present) ObjectB .. But if this methods checks if ObjectA exists in ObjectB and results a boolean I’m completely lost..
- I’ve seen people trying to fix problems which where never identified as problems. E.g. extremely complex logic to solve a minor performance issue which was never identified as an performance issue..
- An over enthusiastic usage of the OO concept.. If you don’t have to inherit from 5 layers deep class, don’t do it..
I’ve probably done my share of youthful sins a couple of years ago. But now a days I try to live by my statement..
Just my 2 cent..