Bad Smells in Code

Jun 17, 2019

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Chapter 3 - Bad Smells in Code

The theme of this chapter: just because you know how to refactor, doesn't mean you know when. This chapter talks about the when.

One thing we won't try to give you is precise criteria for when a refactoring is overdue. In our experience, no set of metrics rivals informed human intuition. What we will do is give you indications that there is trouble that can be solved by a refactoring.

Mysterious Name

there can be ambiguity in your naming in many places: variable, class, function, method, database field, etc

Duplicated Code 🔥

keep it dry

Long Functions 🔥

Since the early days of programming, people have realized that the longer a function is, the more difficult it is to understand

Long Parameter List 🔥

long parameter lists can be confusing

Global Data 🔥

the problem with global data is that it can be modified from anywhere in the codebase, making it harder to figure out which code touched it should you need to debug it

Mutable Data

changes to data often lead to unexpected consequences and tricky bugs
mutable data that can be calculated elsewhere is particularly pungent

Divergent Change ✅

if you look at a module and say, "well, I will have to change these three functions every time -------- happens" - this is an indication of divergent change
divergent change occurs when one module is often changed in different ways for different reasons
can be solved with split phase, extract function, extract class, move function

Shotgun Surgery ✅

similar to divergent change.
every you make a change, you need to make a ton of little edits to a lot of different classes

Feature Envy

occurs when a function in one module spends more time communicating with functions or data inside another module than it does within its own.

Data Clumps

grouping data together when it really should be it's own object

Primitive Obsession ✅

programmers are often hesitant to create their own types and rely only on primitives. i.e. representing a phone number as a string instead of as it's own type

Repeated Switches

alleviated with polymorphism

Loops

use pipelines instead, i.e. filter, map, each, reduce

Speculative Generality ✅

editor choice

can be spotted when the only users of a function or class are a test case. this is a classic case of premature optimization. "we'll eventually want to add this feature..."

Message Chains

when a client asks one object for another object, which the client then asks for yet another object, and so on.

Middle Man

when you have too much delegation (due to all of your great encapsulating of implementation details)
the solution is to delegate directly, cut the middle man