First of all, velocity is not just a number. It’s always a range, or an average with error margins. Why is this important? Because if you do your planning based on a single number, without taking into account the normal variation in productivity that is always there, you can be sure your planning is not giving you a realistic idea of what will be done when. In other words: realise that your planning is an estimation of when you think a certain set of work can be done.

<ul> <li> working on something that's not going to be used (in a while), </li> <li> doing work that will need re-doing (once the customer sees the initial work, <a href="licationengineering.blogspot.com/2010/11/humphreys-requirements-uncertainty.html">he will change his mind</a>), </li> <li> skewing your estimates: too much detail can inflate estimates beyond any realistic values. </li> </ul> </div> <div> Of course, there are things that can help with this such as, ahum, having a clear vision, but you need to start somewhere.

Last week Wednesday, I organised my first Code Dojo! For those that are not familiar with the concept, a Code Dojo is when programmers get together to exercise their craft by solving a problem together. The problem is called a ‘Kata’, analogous to the way these concepts are used in the Karate world. As a problem, I had selected the ‘Gilded Rose’ Kata, for which I have created a Java version a while back.

In my last post I discussed the refactoring of a particular piece of code. Incrementally changing the code had resulted in some clear improvements in its complexity, but the end-result still left me with a unsatisfied feeling: I had not been test-driving my changes, and that was noticeable in the resulting code!

So, as promised, here we are to re-examine the code as we have it, and see if when we start testing it more thoroughly. In my feeble defence, I’d like to mention again why I delayed testing. I really didn’t have a good feel of the intended functionality, and because of that decided to test later, when I hoped I would have a better idea of what the code is supposed to do. That moment is now.

Again a fairly long post, so it’s hidden behind the ‘read more’ link, sorry!

One of the things I find myself doing at work is looking at other peoples code. This is not unusual, of course, as every programmer does that all the time. Even if the ‘other people’ is him, last week. As all you programmers know, rather often ‘other people’s code’ is not very pretty. Partly, this can be explained because every programmer knows, no one is quite as good at programming as himself… But very often, way too often, the code really is not all that good.

This can be caused by many things. Sometimes the programmers are not very experienced. Sometimes the pressure to release new features is such that programmers feel pressured into cutting quality. Sometimes the programmers found the code in that state, and simply didn’t know where to start to improve things. Some programmers may not even have read Clean Code, Refactoring, or the Pragmatic Programmer! And maybe no one ever told them they should.

Recently I was asked to look at a Java codebase, to see if it would be possible for our company to take that into a support contract. Or what would be needed to get it to that state. This codebase had a number of problems, with lack of tests, lots of code duplication and a very uneven distribution in complexity (lots of ‘struct’ classes and the logic that should be in them spread out, and duplicated, over the rest). There was plenty wrong, and sonar quickly showed most of them.

When discussing the issues with this particular code base, I noticed that the developers already knew quite a few of the things that were wrong. They did not have a clear idea of how to go from there towards a good state, though. To illustrate how one might approach this, I spent a day making an example out of one of the high complexity classes (cyclomatic complexity of 98).

Larger examples of refactoring are fairly rare out there, so I figured I’d share this. Of course, package and class names (and some constants/variables) have been altered to protect the innocent.

I’d like to emphasize that none of this is very special. I’m not a wizard at doing this, by any standard. I don’t even code full time nowadays. That’s irrelevant: The point here is precisely that by taking a series of very simple and straightforward steps, you can improve your code tremendously. Anyone can do this! Everyone should…

I don’t usually shield off part of my posts under a ‘read-more’ link, but this post had become HUGE, and I don’t want to harm any unsuspecting RSS readers out there. Please, do read the whole thing. And: Let me (and my reader and colleagues) know how this can be done better!

The company Our company, Qualogy, is based in The Netherlands. It is a consultancy company specialised in Java and Oracle technologies that has been using Scrum and Agile both internally and for customers for a while, now. Our company has a daughter company based in Suriname, a former Dutch colony where Dutch is a national language, and where Software Development project are still a relatively rare event. This daughter company is primarily meant to serve the local Suriname market, using local talent, at local prices.