The Best Ways To Simplify Your Code? (dice.com)

Nerval's Lobster writes: Technical debt arises for many reasons—whether moving goal posts, pressure to get code tested and released, high programmer turnover, and lack of documentation. Over time, it can also render code a spaghetti-like mess. But how to deal with it? In a new column on Dice, developer David Bolton offers some suggestions, ranging from refactoring to using compiler inference to increase readability and shorten declarations. While those techniques are straightforward, it's clear that a lot of developers let their code get out of control, and trying to plan beforehand doesn't necessarily prevent the work from getting overcomplicated. It seems like every developer has a go-to technique (or four) for keeping things a little more streamlined. What are yours?

Comments

code reviews

[lcall]

I agree about code reviews: in fact I consider them essential in a team environment and wouldn't want to work in a code base where they will not be consistently held, at least going forward. Then the team can agree on some kind of standards and I recommend that the team develop a checklist for things the reviewer should check, where near the top of the list is: "Would I want to maintain this, and could I understand it easily if I came back to it years from now?". Also somewhere on the list is: "How was this tested?". Nothing ever gets into the master branch without such a review. Ideally the review is asynchronous, at least the first pass, to help see if the code is clear without its author explaining it.

Also, the coder should review his own code first with that in mind, before sending it to someone else to review.

Otherwise code becomes a mess. On a team small enough to enforce it, things can go much better.

Refactor strategy

[swilver]

When I want to refactor code, I first make sure we're working in a programming language that is suited for refactoring. That usually means it must be Java... nothing comes close in refactorability. It certainly rules out anything that isn't extensively checked by a compiler (eg. Javascript) -- there's always code paths that aren't covered in tests, and you rely on the compiler to warn you of potential problems in those.

Second, I make sure there are good tests available, not just unit tests but also integration tests. This is usually the case on projects I work on, or I won't be sticking around for long.

Third, I do refactors in tiny incremental steps. Usually it's like "remove one method", "remove a parameter", "add/remove an interface", "delete a class", "split a class", "move a method", "make a parameter required by moving it to a constructor", "make something immutable by removing its setter".

As soon as you do one of those, there are gonna be errors detected by the compiler. I ignore the ones in tests and quickly check the ones in real code to see if the refactoring does not have something I did not foresee that would be tough to fix. If there's something unforeseen, I think about what refactoring would be need to be done before this one that would make that easier to fix later.

Once it looks like it will work, I fix the errors in one class, then in its test, then run the test to see if nothing broke. Then I go to next class, until all the errors are gone (usually this takes around an hour for 50-200 errors when I started).

I then run all the tests, and if everything is ok, I make a commit of that refactor step. Then I start with the next incremental refactor step. At any time, I can merge the stuff with master and stop and work on something else, while still having some small benefits of the refactorings done so far.

In this fashion I've refactored existing code bases to use a different time/date system, refactored code to use two different models (instead of a unified one), made models slowly immutable (it's amazing how many problems you discover when you start doing that), etcetera.