Page History

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Current List of Re-factoring Focus Areas

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Other ways to help

If our top 5 areas seem a little too much for you to take on then you can help in other areas too, and a little bit of work quickly adds up. Below are some other ideas for helping remove clutter and help clean up the code base.

• - Obsolete / irrelevant comments: anything out of date
• - Commented out code:  it belongs in the version control system
• - functions with too many arguments: anything beyond 3 arguments is probably too much unless there is a good reason for it.
• - functions that do too many things - multiple languages in the same text file
• - Big files / Big classes / Big anything really!
• - Duplication and cut-and-paste patterns
• - Mixed levels of abstraction: You can't declare high level stuff like starting the framework with details like flag parsing in the same place. Things should read like a story from high level down to the details. Main calls higher level functions which then call lower functions which executes detailed code.
• - Any concrete class not implementing an interface is probably a code smell, especially if too many dependencies point to it.
• - cluttered code, sandwiched in an ugly way
• - Pretty much all the Java warnings in the current code base
• - too much use of the "new" keyword instead of having a proper factory
• - writing to classes instead of interfaces - Confusing names for classes, functions, and variables. Things should be very clear and simple
• - Confusing test names - Lack of testing for any production code. Ideally, our tests should cover 100% of the code base.
• - inconsistent formatting conventions. Tabs instead of spaces, wrong number of spaces for indentation, and so on
• - Also, one of the worst things I usually encounter is hidden state. For example, you get hidden state in a Java class if the constructor declares a field that was not passed into the constructor. It makes the declaration hidden and the dependency obscure.