Questions for best practices for writing high quality code.
0
votes
3answers
91 views
How do you balance out code structuring (few big functions vs. many small ones)?
The golden rule of code structuring is always said as splitting into many sub functions is a good thing. Though I noticed it becomes a problem in complex applications when a class of e.g. 10 bigger ...
7
votes
4answers
198 views
How to handle flag in multiple if-else's
I seem to see this often enough in my code and others. There's nothing about it that seems horribly wrong, but it annoys me as it looks like it can be done better. I suppose a case statement, might ...
0
votes
1answer
125 views
Really bad example projects that use sonar [closed]
When consideringen whether to use sonar or not, it would be great to see both good code as well as bad code that use sonar for static code analysis.
I have browsed http://nemo.sonarsource.org/ ...
19
votes
9answers
973 views
What exactly makes code “clean”? [duplicate]
I am an intern at a small software company, doing typical grunt work. Many tasks that the actual developers are doing are above my head however I finally got to see some real "action" and write some ...
1
vote
4answers
139 views
Most human-friendly way to order class method definitions?
In any given class definition, I've seen the method definitions ordered in various ways: alphabetical, chronological based on most common usage, alphabetical grouped by visibility, alphabetical with ...
0
votes
1answer
109 views
In MVC is it concidered good practice to have private, non-action, functions in a controller class?
Sometimes action functions in the controller class can become huge and nasty, with many-many lines of code to simply control the flow of data from the Model to the View. At some point these huge ...
1
vote
2answers
135 views
Any suggestions on how to over-rely on Google? [closed]
I don't know whether you Google a lot while you coding. I discover my coding practise always rely on Googling. One of the reason why is I don't familiar with the framework, So, I will do How to XXX in ...
15
votes
5answers
745 views
Is this pattern bad? [duplicate]
I notice that when I code I often use a pattern that calls a class method and that method will call a number of private functions in the same class to do the work. The private functions do one thing ...
1
vote
2answers
97 views
Private Repository Management for Potential Employers
I have some projects that I do not wish to be viewed publicly (some of them are school course work), but I want to show them to my potential employers. Ideally, I would be able to generate some ...
7
votes
2answers
374 views
What does Uncle Bob mean by 'noun phrase names'?
I am reading Clean Code by Uncle Bob. Because I am not a native-English speaker, I couldn't understand following statement:
Classes and objects should have noun or noun phrase names like
...
0
votes
0answers
151 views
Coding “style” interview questions [closed]
I'm looking at coding interview questions and most of them are either algorithms or knowledge questions but sometimes I'm asked simple questions that don't involve a lot of thought just to see how I ...
1
vote
2answers
237 views
Prevent code from getting mess [duplicate]
I am a student and a freelance programmer. These days I am developing a software in VB6 which has recently crossed 100KB of source code.
The main problem, I face is, many times I have to refactor my ...
4
votes
4answers
150 views
How can we track how well we're preventing and avoiding security vulnerabilities?
It's pretty easy to track when we fix security vulnerabilities in existing code. But to make sure the whole team is staying on their toes about writing secure code, I'd like to also track how well we ...
4
votes
3answers
266 views
HTML code in Java class
A conceptual question, I tried to google but couldn't find any definitive answers, so here it goes:
Is it a good practice to write Java methods to return HTML strings that will be returned to the ...
1
vote
1answer
70 views
Estimated errors in implementation comparison
I've been working on improving an existing library to be more maintainable after trying to implement a feature I wanted and found the code to be hard to alter.
The library is a node.js grunt plugin ...
1
vote
1answer
97 views
Maintenance code needs improvements [duplicate]
I am currently maintaining/enhancing a project a bit old speaking of the 1990's. Atleast 15 developers would have worked over it.
Going through the code for understanding is bit difficult.
No ...
-4
votes
1answer
82 views
Free Quality Control Online Tool [closed]
Is there a good free Software Quality Control tool? I want to be able to write test cases for my software development.
2
votes
3answers
301 views
What feedback is or is not appropriate for a code review? [duplicate]
I am interested in hearing some guidelines as to what feedback is or is not appropriate for a code review. My team has a very unstructured review process and I am trying to suggest some ways to ...
-1
votes
6answers
469 views
Is enrolling all programmers of our team in Microsoft Certification Training a good idea? [closed]
Is it a good idea to enroll all members of our development team in Microsoft Windows App Dev Certification Training? The goal would be to increase the quality of our product and having a more ...
2
votes
1answer
143 views
What does the “4” in LCOM4 mean?
I know that methods in a class should have high cohesion which roughly translates to having all the methods use all the instance variables directly or indirectly. I know that LCOM4 (Lack of ...
2
votes
2answers
105 views
Strategies for using a code metric evaluation tool
Should code quality metric evaluation tools like Sonar be integrated with IDE for running local analysis or should they be a part of the build process (like integrated with maven) for continuous ...
-1
votes
1answer
54 views
Code network metrics with UI events [closed]
There is a large body of literature regarding using network metrics (e.g. degree) for predicting defects. Something I'm running into is that a lot of my code is event-driven, so I have a large number ...
41
votes
8answers
2k views
What's the right balance between code consistency and code improvement?
Recently I had a discussion with a colleague regarding code style. He was arguing that your usage of APIs and the general patterns you are using should be as similar as possible with the surrounding ...
4
votes
2answers
486 views
How do I handle having so many SQL queries?
I have an MVC3 project that uses SQL Server.
I use data from the SQL database all the time and I often find that I'm reusing/duplicating some SQL queries. I thought I'd solve this problem by creating ...
0
votes
2answers
142 views
Code review practice in medium team [closed]
I'm looking for a way to organize code review process.
My inputs:
4-5 members in the team;
SVN/IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition.
Solution criteria:
Should support human review with ...
3
votes
5answers
271 views
Obsessed with finding most elegant solution [duplicate]
I find that at times I get obsessed with finding the most elegant solution to a problem or task.
I'll spend hours trawling the internet/texts for ideas and discussion on the right way to solve a ...
4
votes
1answer
170 views
Is there a modern replacement for a mutation testing tool like Jester for Java?
“Why just think your tests are good when you can know for sure?
Sometimes Jester tells me my tests are airtight, but sometimes the
changes it finds come as a bolt out of the blue. Highly ...
16
votes
4answers
1k views
Why is test driven development missing from Joel's Test?
I was reading this blog by Joel Spolsky about 12 steps to better code. The absence of Test Driven Development really surprised me. So I want to throw the question to the Gurus. Is TDD not really worth ...
2
votes
1answer
171 views
Understanding high cohesion principle for methods in object oriented design
I know the idea of strong cohesion applies to methods as much it applies to classes. Just to be clear when I say strong cohesion of a method I mean a method which does only one task and does it well. ...
7
votes
2answers
390 views
How to deal with too much pragmatism in the project?
My team and I took over a medium sized codebase over a year ago when the previous tech lead left the company. Originating from the lack of man power I fear we favored pragmatic solutions over best ...
3
votes
4answers
484 views
What can I do to maintain respect for a poorly written codebase? [duplicate]
In my job I have to maintain a poorly written codebase which is both hard to understand, has tons of comments that are just plain wrong, has a bunch of weird decisionmaking going on in it and a whole ...
6
votes
3answers
139 views
Why would each widget need a reference to its parent in a simple widget system?
I'm working on a simple widget system (single window, fixed size). Each widget gets its parent (i.e. the widget containing it) passed into its constructor - except for the root widget, which I called ...
4
votes
2answers
345 views
code review with git-flow and github
With regular git and github I can do a code review by simply creating a pull request of the feature branch I'm working on to the master branch. How would I do code reviews with git-flow? With workflow ...
6
votes
1answer
203 views
Are there any empirical studies about the effects of commenting source code on software quality, maintainability and developer productivity?
I am an advocate of commenting on source code and documenting software products. It is my personal experience and observation that working on source code that is rigorously commented has helped me in ...
1
vote
3answers
355 views
Legitimate reasons for circular references in C++
I have project written in C++ that I am working on which has a parent-child relationship where each child has only one parent. I had previously decided after looking at this post that I would make the ...
-1
votes
3answers
150 views
Programming task to test for focus on maintainability [closed]
I am looking for a programming task, which shows whether the coder has maintainability in mind while programming. I imagine giving a task to fix a bug in a method. It should be clear to the programmer ...
1
vote
2answers
98 views
@Deprecated as of version x.y in JavaDoc
This question & its answers are useful but not sufficient for my problem.
My Question is if I want to add a javadoc as @Deprecated As of version x.y, replaced by {@link SomeClass} in my current ...
62
votes
19answers
11k views
How important is it to reduce the number of lines in code?
I am a Software developer who works on J2SE (core java).
Often during our code reviews we are asked to reduce the number of lines in our code.
It's not about removing redundant code, it's about ...
3
votes
4answers
335 views
Declaring functions in order to avoid explicit nested loops
My programming professor has told me that it is a good programming practice (at least in C/C++) to declare a function with the inner loop when nesting loops (not for loops, since when, i.e. looping ...
5
votes
3answers
324 views
Is 'using' appropriate in a context where there is nothing to dispose?
In C#, using statement is used to dispose in a deterministic manner the resources without waiting for garbage collector. For example, it may be used to:
Dispose SQL commands or connections,
Close ...
16
votes
5answers
1k views
Descriptive naming vs. 80 character lines [closed]
I frequently hear these two valuable programming practices: (1) lines of code should be 80 characters or less and (2) use descriptive names for variables, methods, classes, etc. I understand the ...
4
votes
7answers
415 views
Should I spend time prettifying unit tests? [closed]
The company I used to work for before we had automated unit tests to test our work. However the coding standards and architecture was not very important for tests. Of course you had to indent code ...
3
votes
1answer
285 views
Why Doesn't Java Allow Default Parameters/Arguments [closed]
Basically something like
public void jumpToRoom(String roomName = Rooms.DEFAULT_ROOM)
would be convenient.
Many languages nowadays seem to support it (Ruby, PHP, even C#).
What is Java's ...
70
votes
8answers
7k views
Recursion or while loops
I was reading about some development interview practices, specifically about the technical questions and tests asked at interviews and I've stumbled quite a few times over sayings of the genre "Ok you ...
8
votes
6answers
340 views
Is looking at random code snippets useful to quickly determine the quality of a project?
To get an idea of the quality of a project that I've never seen before (usually open source projects that I'm considering whether or not to use), I often start by opening random files and eyeballing ...
7
votes
5answers
835 views
Is code duplication a necessary evil in C?
I'm rather new to C, and I'm wondering if code duplication is a necessary evil when it comes to writing common data structures and C in general?
I could try to write a generic implementation for a ...
6
votes
5answers
379 views
Is a coder that 'quality checks' bug fixes and bugs raised by testers a recognised role?
I've recently found myself frequently in the position where I'm checking both bug fixes by other programmers, and bugs raised by the QA team.
Any bug fixes frequently end up having 'collateral ...
5
votes
2answers
307 views
what tools should I use for quality assurance and testing for front end javascript? [closed]
I am using jquery and HTML 5 techniques (like File API, HistoryAPI) extensively in a project I am working on.
I was wondering what tools I can use for
quality assurance my javascript and front ...
7
votes
6answers
377 views
what is the best way to ensure accountability in code checkins?
Note: after writing this I realize that this question is perhaps philosophical, but I'm interested in how the industry handles this scenario regardless.
I have recently been working with a code base ...
9
votes
5answers
374 views
Is adhering to one assert per test foolish consistency in this case?
I have a class that I'm testing. The class has a function: apply(List<IRule> rules, List<ITarget> targets);
In one test I want to ensure that each target has been passed to one rule, a ...
