In Coding, Nothing is Trivial

Imagine you're reviewing some code, as part of a Pull Request, and the developer has misspelt a variable. Or added a magic string instead of a constant. Or put the expected/actual parameters in an assertion the wrong way around (although it kinda doesn't matter because they're the same)?

You can politely comment on it, and perhaps they will fix it up. But sometimes you might be met with resistance. 

"It's not that important."

To a degree, they're right. These are pretty trivial observations. There are probably bigger things to address, such as the logic, the architecture, the test coverage etc. 

However, in coding, these trivial issues tend to come back to bite you, either as bugs, or as maintenance headaches.

You don't want to nag people. You don't want to become a "clean code nazi". But you can firmly assert that you think a mistake is being made and that a potential issue could arise. 

There are some things in coding that are a personal preference. There are some things that are virtually (though not completely) insignificant and which you should avoid fighting about (tabs vs spaces) and then there are things which actually matter. The lines are blurred and you should always be pragmatic - but the things which actually matter can be proven to matter - a misnamed variable can cause confusion, expected/actual parameters the wrong way around can lead to false positives in your tests, and magic strings can lead to runtime errors, code duplication, and mysterious bugs that can really mess up your day.

What's important is that you communicate these issues when making your suggestions. Make it clear that this isn't a personal preference thing - it's not you being fussy, but that it could lead to genuine problems. 

The main reason that many of these "trivial" issues can lead to serious problems is maintainability - other developers working on the code.  Maintainability is just so important - not having it leads to bugs, slow development, demoralised developers and more. Anything that affects maintainability, isn't trivial. Its effects are amplified because of all the people that become involved in the problem.

When you have maintainability problems, you get bugs. It doesn't take much to turn a badly named variable into a half day investigation and a costly Production change.

So, raise your standards. Don't settle for "It's not that important". If you have an issue with it, if it niggles at your brain even slightly, it's for a good reason. Your subconcious can spot a time bomb. Trust it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Writing Good Acceptance Criteria

Image
As discussed in my last article , Writing good Acceptance Criteria gives the Agile team clarity and helps them work towards a common goal, saving time and effort while increasing quality. Now I'd like to dig into the details of how to write good Acceptance Criteria. Behaviour Driven vs Procedural Driven Mindsets Many of us may be used to writing/seeing procedural driven tests; step by step instructions with actions and expected results. Procedure-driven tests are often imperative and trace a path through the system that covers multiple behaviors. As a result, they may be unnecessarily long, which can delay failure investigation, increase maintenance costs, and create confusion. Acceptance criteria, and indeed Behaviour Driven tests, should instead be behaviour driven. This means they should be Declarative , specifying how a system should behave in a particular scenario. Procedural/Imperative: Given the user opens a web browser And the user navigate
Read more

Amazing Things You Can Do With Azure Storage Queues

Image
Load Balancing and Workload distribution Queues can be used to organise the distribution of a workload across multiple processors. A common technique is to post messages to a queue which are a key to a task which needs to be performed, and have multiple worker processes pick these tasks from the queue to perform in parallel. This can be combined with other storage mechanisms to perform complex tasks. Say you were trying to render an animation. The queue could be loaded with keys, which point to an entity in Table storage. This entity could contain the Url of an image stored in blob storage. A worker process would pick up the message from the queue, reference the entity from the table and download the image from blob storage. It could then perform compute intensive tasks on the image while other worker processes picked up other images. In this way, cloud storage can be used to augment worker roles and perform powerful parallel operations. Asynchronous Processing and Temporal
Read more

The 7 Layers of Creativity

Image
It is said that art imitates life. To be able to express oneself creatively is both powerful and fulfilling. True creativity resides within all of us, but because of the power of creativity those that aren’t ‘naturally gifted’ feel intimidated to even try. By breaking down the fundamental layers of creativity, we see that the process of creating art is not only simple, but can be applied to all activities of your life – whether you are organizing a file cabinet or painting a self portrait, these 7 steps will help you find art in all that you do in life. Imagine you’re painting a picture. You find a nice spot, on the beach. You find an appropriate angle, where you will have an interesting view of the sea, with the beach and a palm tree coming in on one side. In the distance, there is a city skyline. It’s a perfect scene. Now, many would assume that the creative process involves simply transferring this beautiful image onto a canvas, that this is what it takes to be crea
Read more