Question

I have been using an Object-Oriented MVC architecture for a web project, and all the models are OO Perl. But I have noticed a couple on the team are reverting to procedural techniques and are essentially using “objects” as dumping grounds for related functions. Their functions basically read/write directly to/from the database.

What’s the best way to convince them this is the wrong way? Are there some good tutorials I can get them to read?

Answer 1

I can think of three possible reasons why some team members may not produce nice OO code:

1. They don’t care
2. They care, try to do it right but lack skills to do it right
3. They are doing it right, or at least right enough! Some matters of design are matters of opinion. Go back and look at some of your own old code, code that you thought was quite good, there’s a good chance that you would revise some of it now.

My approach is to make the assumption that everybody wants to do the job right, so I assume (or pretend to assume) that folks care. One tries to build an ethos of wanting to do it right.

So that leaves building our skills, theirs and yours (and mine). Code reviews seem like one obvious way to do this. Talk about alternatives. Also maybe pair-programming?