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Look Inside >>  July 24, 2008

I’m currently maintaining a production application that has given me headaches since I started. It is less than two years old and meets all of it’s requirements, but it’s lack of maintainability has it slated to be rewritten in the next few months. Despite several subroutines that are more than 2000 SLOC I’ve sort of begun to understand the way it is written and how to more quickly make edits to the code. At times it’s made me question my troubleshooting skills but now that I am less frustrated by the app, I’m beginning to wonder where in the development cycle it failed. For all it’s flaws, it does it’s job. Yet it’s a far higher priority to rewrite it than it should be given it’s age and production record. The issue is it takes a long time to make changes and most changes cause unwanted side effects.

First off, there are obviously some general engineering issues that plague this app (note the large subroutines). I’m going to ignore those because although textbook examples of poor engineering practice riddle this app, it should still be clear what the intent of a block of code is. This is the first place it fails: NO COMMENTS. Ignoring all the other problems, if the app was commented it would be 75% easier to maintain and would not require a rewrite so soon.

It seems obvious to me why code comments are a good thing, but I’ve heard arguments against them. The most common is “good code comments itself.” I read a great counterpoint to this from Jef Raskin. Comments not only tell other developers what the code does but why:

A binary search turned out to be slower than the Boyer-Moore algorithm for the data sets of interest, thus we have used the more complex, but faster method even though this problem does not at first seem amenable to a string search technique

Thanks Jef! I would also like to note that it takes far less time to read and understand a block of code than to read a single line comment that explains what the block does. It at least helps identify if this block is the one you are looking for or if you should keep going.

The second major problem kind of falls in line with the first. Evidently there were not any design specs or requirements written for the application. The only thing that is left here is talking to the original stakeholders and trying to figure out what the initial specs were and digging through the many thousands of lines of code to figure out exactly what the current app is doing. Obviously, there isn’t a very good chance that the requirements (the initial ones or what the app has evolved into) will be reconstructed with any degree of exactness.

All I can think of is my first semester in Computer Science when we were all told the worst thing to do when writing an app the worst thing to do is open your IDE and start coding. Turns out they were onto something.

There is little to do between vomit sessions when you have no cable. Last night’s lineup between 11pm and 5am:

V for Vendetta - perhaps the best comic book movie there is (haven’t seen Iron Man or Dark Knight)
Rush Hour 3 - more a lack of options than a choice. Predictable and occasionally amusing
Mallrats - hadn’t seen this in years. Forgot about Ben Affleck’s career best line:

Yeah, who’s your favourite New Kid. Yeah, call me Joey. Oh, come on. Don’t make me get loose. Yeah, that’s right. Call me Donnie. Oh, girl. Oh, please don’t go girl.

Also caught The Natural and No Country for Old Men to round out my longest run in front of the TV in many years.

At first I thought I was imagining this, but I’ve seen it enough now to think it’s actually intentional. It seems the volume of commercials no longer matches the volume of the show. Some are far louder. Not all commercials, probably just the ones from the advertisers who pay extra. This sucks.

That is all

baldinoos posted a photo:

Vince wanted me to call it a draw, but the swollen eye and nose tell a different story.