August Meeting: Code Smell Clinic

Details

Date: Monday 22nd August

Time: 7:15pm start to a 9:15pm (doors open at 6:30pm and close when we’re bored, or drunk).

Location: http://www.pieandale.com

Theme: Code Smell Clinic

Code Smells Presentation

Computer Scientists and Software Developers love analogies. You’ll find that the Agile fraternity love metaphors and double meanings more than any other breed of software developer. A Code Smell is one of the most obvious metaphors and comes from the instinctive reaction to bad smelling food – a primordial reaction to tell you that the food is bad, of low quality and should not be eaten. While smelly code might not poison you it can turn the stomach once you’ve honed your software craftsmanship skills.

We’ll begin the session with an overview of some of the more common code smells. Bring your argument hats, as some of these points are going to be controversial.

The Clinic

This will be a unique opportunity for you to take a step back and, along with the help of the rest of the group, analyse the quality of your code. We’ll identify smells, discuss how to fix them through refactoring and how to apply design patterns that would prevent similar in the future. For this session to work we will need code – don’t be embarrassed to bring in stuff you’ve been working on, stuff you’ve found, stuff you’ve seen – we’ll all work together to help you improve.

Language doesn’t matter, we’ll use Notepad++ to inspect the code – it doesn’t even have to compile or run. If you have a solution with some unit tests, even better, as we can verify our refactorings. Given the mix of people that usually attend hopefully we’ll see some C# web stuff, gaming code, PHP, JavaScript and good old smelly Java.