How did it work in the culture I described? Avoid writing tests that verify multiple assertions within a single test method. Is consequent and efficient refactoring enemy of code reviews in a legacy code context? The same philosophy is valid in software development too. Applying many of the prior DevTips will help to achieve effective abstraction, encapsulation, and Separation of Concerns that will greatly promote readability. This will eliminate the need to recompile and redeploy that module (or possibly the entire application) any time a case is added or changed. Draw your component graph as a tree and make sure all the arrows point downward. The boy scout software developer - dhanugupta.github.io "I'm talking about actual performance and correctness issues" - then this might be stretching the definition of refactoring; if the code is actually incorrect it would constitute bug fixing. That may help you to draw a first dividing line. Design your software in such a way that the dependencies between your components do not form a cycle. It's more painful, but certainly possible. Avoid Eager Tests that verify too many test conditions. You could make it much easier on the reviewer by making a clearly labeled "Whitespace commit" first and then do your commit with changes. Unlike the Abstract Factory Pattern, it is not necessary to instantiate separate factory classes. To decouple functionality, write methods that tell objects what to do. Most of programmers, however, have probably heard of the Boy. You don't have to make it perfect, you don't have to fix it all, but improve it just a little bit. Safeguarding billions of login transactions each month, Auth0 delivers convenience, privacy, and security so customers can focus on innovation. You have three choices: work to fix the system, accept the system, leave the system. Avoid this design smell by building loosely coupled software systems through effective dependency management. As a Scout, you get to experience nature by camping outdoors which teaches you one of the core values respect life. You'll more likely find the right angle. whenever and wherever code needs to cleaned up - by whoever. "Even if we don't enjoy a codebase too much, we still have to respect it because other people have worked hard on it. Learn more about Stack Overflow the company, and our products. Avoid stringing method calls together on a single line of code to invoke methods within different objects. THE BOY SCOUTS HAVE A RULE: Always leave the campground cleaner than you found it. If you find a mess on the ground, you clean it up regardless of who might have made it. Now, I am expressing my opinion here, I know others share this, there are probably studies that prove this. Some developers are scared of refactoring because they are scared of ALL code changes. What would be the This also enforces consistency among classes of objects by forcing the system to use objects from only one family at a time. Learn how to apply the Scout code to software development to get code to a better state continuously. By applying this rule in software development, developers aim to enhance code quality, reduce technical debt, and foster a culture of continuous improvement. Run away! There are politics that make it easier to leave well enough alone. Whenever I change anything that's not in the scope of my "assignment" I'm being rebuked by my reviewers that I'm making the change harder to review. Is spreading code with refactoring comments a good idea? If you can sneak in one tiny refactoring per week without too much pain, in a couple of months you might be able to get away with two per week. The Boy Scout Rule is Now the Scout Rule - DEV Community Ben Halpern Posted on May 9, 2018 The Boy Scout Rule is Now the Scout Rule # culture # namingthings Our field is built on metaphors and naming conventions. Code review helps keep a body of code uniform. The Boy Scout Rule in Coding ~ To Mastery - Blogger Scout rules help support core Scout values. Add steps to the README. Reconciling the Boy Scout Rule and Opportunistic Refactoring with code I should mention that our code library was on a mainframe and had no version control -- you basically overwrote whatever was there, and that was it. So when requirements change, we will know which components are affected and which are not. Bullet 1 doesn't claim that separating the commits is impossible. This way, you will be able to learn a lot more. It should be something that just isn't done.. Find out how. I wasn't wasting time (in my eyes) -- the cleaned up code was easier to read and understand. This will foster Defect Localization and support Repeatable Tests, while minimizing overlap and dependencies between tests. Design your software in such a way that components are as abstract as they are stable. Not for the reasons that your code reviewers are giving, though; it sounds like they don't really care about the quality of the code, and you do care, which is awesome. Unfortunately not all of my team use resharper, and even those who do don't take it too seriously. Refactoring is supposed to be about small, safe changes that don't alter behavior. One great metaphor is the "Boy Scout Rule". Boy Scout Rule. @t0x1n: the Boy Scout Rule involves the modules you are touching, mostly. Always check code in cleaner than you checked it out. Employing these Test-Driven Development (TDD) practices will promote a comprehensive test suite which is essential for Continuous Integration (CI). . Press CTRL-Z a few times and you are right back to where you started before the error was introduced. The Open-Closed Principle (OCP) states that software entities (classes, modules, methods, etc.) If you can get your code reviewers to pair with you, the combative element of code review should evaporate. What is Boy Scout Rule? discouragement and bring it up with the team. Site design / logo 2023 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under CC BY-SA. I have seen code review as an attempt to avoid testing. They don't trust themselves to make ANY change, and they certainly won't trust you. One of them is in my daily work programming! Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. A CR has a certain overhead and your manager doesn't want you to "waste your time" on refactoring. The code has to be kept clean over time. One principle that can make a significant difference in code quality and ease of maintenance is the Boy Scouting Rule. I am a great believer in the Boy Scout Rule: Always check a module in cleaner than when you checked it out." Design your software in such a way that any given component depends on other components that are more stable than it is. If you are fixing a bug, and find the code around it is a mess, fix a bit of that mess. The tool you use tends to focus code reviews in certain ways. Keep your codebase as small as possible. Small changes should be able to be built, tested, and deployed very quickly and independently of each other. Promote the reuse of existing classes by changing their interfaces into ones that are compatible with other classes. Building a Persistent Fixture that survives the life of the test must be torn down within the test method to avoid side effects and keep the fixture fresh. Writing simple code can often be difficult. This approach enables you to swap factories in and out at runtime, providing real-time flexibility as to how objects are created. My answer was to keep your role as a reviewer pure. If nothing else, maybe I'll convince you that as bad as a situation is, it could be worse. Since developers spend much more time reading code than they do writing it, writing readable code contributes greatly to productivity. Some obvious ones (noted at the bottom of this post) may include Anemic Domain Models, Assertion Roulette, Boolean Arguments, Train Wrecks, large methods or classes, multiple responsibilities, etc. Management agreed that we needed to "do something" before quality became unacceptably low. Acceptance tests should also be kept as short as possible. Programming is a craft that involves creating, modifying, and maintaining code. Without a known 'offender' there is little anyone can do, besides investigating the trash, and trying to . Feature Envy occurs when a function frequently interacts with data or functions in other modules. "Don't bother me, this is an important check-in and I don't have time to fix bugs.". But this approach is not an excuse for not allocating exclusive time and developers to fix issues in a codebase; it is just one way to continuously get things to a better state. Despite the fact that many managers understand this, they are held accountable for changes to production code. 589). Simple as that. Even if I don't go camping often nowadays, I follow this rule in a lot of different situations in my life. While this may require more effort tomorrow, time is more often wasted by investing in requirements that change or become irrelevant. Where I work, there is one development practice that causes heavy friction - Code Review (CR). Start small. The Boy Scout Software Development Principle - DZone Five Software Development Trends Microservices Security in a Nutshell Unlock the Power of Software Heritage Archive Less Frequently Used. The Boy Scouts of America have a simple rule that we can apply to our profession: Leave the campground cleaner than you found it. In my experience there are a few ways to refactor. For example, business rules should be encapsulated within components to enable reuse across multiple systems. PDF Rules Regulations Sept20 - Scouting This is an effective method for eliminating technical debt and adhering to the Open/Closed Principle when your code is used by clients outside of your system. Separation of Concerns (SoC) is a design principle that promotes modularity by separating all but those parts of a system that are closely related and require direct interaction. Yes, your understanding is correct, you'd have two sequential commits with the second (functional) depending on the first (refactoring). floating around when better names will work. . A code smell by itself is not a problem rather an indicator of a likely (underlying) problem. The place I work has a lot of chemical engineering-heavy code. By interposing a Facade object between low-level objects and their clients, you can control what the clients can do and how the low-level objects can respond. Maybe you look at the code you need to modify and immediately know it needs cleanup, so you do that first. The shorter the message, the larger the prize, Find out all the different files from two different paths efficiently in Windows (with Python). I'd make essentially the same recommendation as GlenH7 that you create two commits - one with only refactorings and (demonstrably or obviously) no functional changes, and one with the functional changes in question. Write functions such that if they change state, they do not return values. If you can split the requested change and the unrequested refactor into two separate change requests, as noted by @GlenH7, then that is the best you can do. @SeanPerry aggreed - but I'm talking about normal circumstances where tests exist, bug bashes will be performed, etc. It is indeed something to contemplate. Write code that is open for extension but closed for modification. Working on a new feature or a bug feels excellent. Can I make it easier and clearer? not only its bad for soul, a company with principles that focus on local maximuns its normally less optimal that a company that focus on global maximuns. What's the right way to say "bicycle wheel" in German? Sometimes reviewers are from different time zones and geographical locations too, so for such cases it won't fly regardless. What I am of course talking about here is pair programming. A change to one part of your system should never break another part that is completely unrelated. Introduced to software development by Robert C. Martin1 Clean code whenever you have touched it 1 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts, Kevlin Henney, 2010 . Rule of thumb for abbreviations: if, when people are talking, they use an abbreviation, it is okay to use that abbreviation in the code. The boy-scout rulewhere does it come from anyway? Thanks Cody. Boy Scout Rule is good but not enough | by rgo Ringo | Wise - Medium Instead, our This book also includes a catalog of twenty-four dependency-breaking techniques that help you work with program elements in isolation and make safer changes. Just remember the Boy Scout Rule, and you'll do ok. Oh, also, don't worry: you'll get plenty of practice maintaining code over the course of your software development career. This will ensure that rate calculations (for example) will not have to be recompiled or redeployed with changes to the database, user interface, or unit tests. Reconciling the Boy Scout Rule and Opportunistic Refactoring with code reviews, martinfowler.com/bliki/CodeOwnership.html, How terrifying is giving a conference talk? This often occurs when we try to minimize the number of tests we need to write. Use an [Obsolete] attribute to generate compiler warnings notifying clients that a particular class will eventually be deprecated. This is the biggest reason to leave working code alone. You shouldn't touch the code that you are reviewing for someone else as that biases your role as a reviewer. There's salesmanship. Precursors of CI Theatre include large user stories, difficult code merges, lengthy code reviews, poor test coverage, long-lived branches, siloed code ownership, broken builds for more than several minutes, and practicing Continuous Isolation by running CI on feature branches. For weeks. I saw a portion of Uncle Bob's presentation here on bad code, and the section on the "Boy Scout rule" (whatever that is) on software development, no matter how funny or crazy it sounds, to me is one of the simplest and better ideas on how we can improve software development. Distances of Fermat point from vertices of a triangle. Give attention to tests that verify the same code in different ways as these may indicate different test conditions. If a reviewer introduces changes then they are no longer just a reviewer. Refactoring with the Advanced Boy Scout Rule - Qafoo At the very least it This will prevent dependent components from having to be needlessly retested and redeployed because a class, that it does not use, was changed within that component. It is more important to make software right than it is to make it work. Make it explicit. This provides very effective dependency management for software components. That said, there are sometimes valid reasons for your coworkers' concerns. you can make lots of tiny commits (individual changes, or fixing the same class of bug in multiple places) and then reorder them, merge them or split them with, partition that into two files: you'll end up with one patch file containing refactorings, and one with functional changes, this isn't entirely trivial - tools such as emacs diff mode may help, NB. Let me show you why. Everyone quickly learns who the "hard" reviewers are, just as they learn the easy ones. Can notes/to-dos in code comments sent to code-reviews result in an effective refactoring process? that's the frustrating part! Jose Romaniello Head of Engineering September 20, 2018 If the code review was otherwise fine, the allow the portion you reviewed to be committed and then refactor the code under a second check-in. For more information, visit https://auth0.com. It's just that the primitive change control tools used by others put some extra one-shot work on them. @t0x1n - Don't look at me. Never mix a refactoring change with a functional change. It states: "Always leave the campground cleaner than you found it". And they can be a little bigger. Every team member has equal ownership and accountability for the entire code base. individuals caring for their own small little part. It is an opportunity to: The codebase will host me for hours or days. I believe that when kids are taught this kind of values through games, repetition, and rewards, it becomes a habit. As an aside, assuming you are doing TDD or some form of red green refactor, one way to ensure that you get engagement from your peer is to use the ping pong pairing technique. You get fewer code reviews, but each one is BIG. When developers make small, consistent improvements to the codebase, the overall quality of the code is enhanced. Sometimes, refactoring is a bad thing. These simple abstractions help to simplify those expressions, making them easier to read and easier to understand not to mention how easy it is to provide a hook for debugging. Even though we were in an old, sick code base that had mostly never been reviewed before, it became "impolite" for a reviewer to comment on anything that was NOT a change line, even to point out an obvious bug. Build abstract classes to encapsulate the responsibility of creating and composing families of related objects. Boy scout rule in 6 examples - the basic principle of web development - DEV Community Not everyone was a scout in his youth. You really should learn to get the most out of your editing, source manipulation and version control tools. Anemic Domain Models are objects that contain data with little or no associated functionality. The person doing your code review needs to be able to be sure that the changes you made did not break anything that used to work. This also sets you up for the next refactor usually Slide Statements or Extract Function. Starting the Prompt Design Site: A New Home in our Stack Exchange Neighborhood, Best Practices for Renaming, Refactoring, and Breaking Changes with Teams. The moral of the story? Refactoring reverses this process to maintain integrity and code quality. Verify the expected behavior of unit and component tests by comparing them to the indirect outputs of the System Under Test (SUT) as they occur. Passport "Issued in" vs. "Issuing Country" & "Issuing Authority". To do so, I distill a lot of written material down to actionable components and provide that to my development team. OAuth2 And OpenID Connect: The Professional Guide. When you pair, you get the review for free and you get a better code review. Why don't you do both, but with separate commits? Code review should happen, as you make the code changes. Tagged with php, codequality. So refactoring is forbidden, right? Are you "the boy scout" software developer? - LinkedIn How To Be an Effective Boy/Girl-Scout Engineer - DZone Please note that I did not mean just "static code analysis" but also other recommendations, something equivalent to Nexus. You assume the second commit will be the functional one, whereas it would typically be the opposite (seeing as I can't tell beforehand what refactoring would have to be done). Sometimes it isn't "worth your time" to perform a refactoring if it is really nit-picky stuff. Of course, no tool catches 100% semantics; this is just a remediation strategy. Then become an "easy" reviewer and clear all your reviews before lunchtime. In our code base, somebody refactored all the instances called aoc to AreaOfConcern, VCE to vaporCloudExplosion, nPlanes to confiningPlanesCount which made the code actually much harder to read for people that had the domain specific knowledge. Even smaller than that. Think of switch statements as missed opportunities to be polymorphic. This pattern provides an alternative to conditional statements for selecting desired behavior and eliminates the need to recompile and redeploy a module (or an entire application) any time a condition is added or changed. This might not actually apply in your situation at all, but there are my thoughts on the issue. Put on your management hat and see with management eyes. It only takes a minute to sign up. This principle is often used metaphorically in software development to emphasize the importance of writing clean, . Learning Library | Boy Scouts of America I mean, all of your thoughts and deductions are entirely correct. I started working at Auth0 before the first line of code for our authentication platform existed. As always, ensure reliable test coverage prior to refactoring and rerun tests often. Design and implement solutions that are needed today; do not invest in capabilities or features that may never be needed. etc). OK, so there are now more things here than are suitable for a comment. Which field is more rigorous, mathematics or philosophy? Minimize the number of tests that depend on a particular piece of functionality such that each test condition is covered by exactly one test. You start wanting to win the evaluation game once you realize that it rewards you with salary increases, bonuses, and stock options :). However I claim this is a myth: (1) Most of the times you only realize what and how you want to refactor when you're in the midst of your assignment. enough refactoring, so it's important to pay attention to anything As Martin Fowler puts it: As you add the functionality, you realize that some code you're adding The first is what Martin calls The Boy Scout Rule: "Leave the campground a little cleaner than you found it." The Boy Scout rule # softwaredevelopment # programming # cleancode # unittesting You are in front of that class and you start sweating. This will also impede attempts to verify complex states or multiple scenarios due to lack of control of all inputs to the SUT. It does mean you can't fix every error you find, but may make it less painful to smuggle through. Changes that affect test fixtures should be encapsulated behind test utility methods. The Learning Library contains links to training videos on various topics related to programs such as Faciltator Development Series. There is a lot of work and the entire environment is very time consuming (emails, interruptions, CRs, failing test cycles you need to fix, meetings, etc. Then simply create derived classes and implement that method for each of the cases. This will ensure that components that need to change frequently will be easy to change and that the stable components that others depend on will not change nearly as often. Take that opportunity to do that before 2 min read. You'll effect more change by not allowing the first negative response to deter you. Of course! A Software Developer's Guide to Maintaining Code - DZone The bug backlog was huge, growing, and life-draining. Not enough coffee this morning. If your code is rigid, you are likely to add a lot of anticipatory design elements to minimize the amount of changes you will need to make later. Where to start with a large crack the lock puzzle like this? Simply explained as the driver is rotated for each step of the RGR cycle, i.e. Like what the scouts did cleanup in campfire, the software developers should implement this principle as well. I guess it boils down to this: code reviews can be good for a project, but a team gets only the benefits they deserve to get. Boy Scout Rule | DevLead.io The boy scout's rule, assumption is that whoever left a mess a the camp site is unknown. Then fixing those errors, or simply backing them out, becomes a trivial task. Very small. Whenever I change anything that's not in the scope of my "assignment" I'm being rebuked by my reviewers that I'm making the change harder to review. People seems more interested in do "his work" right than in make the product better, probably this company has a "blame" culture instead of a colaborative culture and the people seems more interested in cover itself than in have a whole product/company vision. One secret to being great at maintaining code is the Boy Scout Rule. This will promote Readability while setting you up for the next refactor usually Extract Function. How to deal with no code reviews in my new place when I come from that practice? We had essentially NO unit tests. How does it apply to programming? Yes, it would definitely be better to refactor that 1000 line long function (that really is an abomination!) Yeah, I get hosed for spacing too, as well as trivial stuff such as redundant casting etc. I have been doing software development for years and being a Scout had already prepared me to transfer the mindset and values exposed by Uncle Bob from the campsite to the codebase. I personally hate the idea of of post commit code reviews.
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