Question

Stackoverflow users,

How do you keep yourself from creating large classes with large bodied methods. When deadlines are tight, you end up trying to hack things together and it ends up being a mess that needs refactoring.

One way is to start with test driven development and that lends itself to good class design as well as SRP (Single Responsibility Principle).

I also see developers double clicking on controls and typing out line after line in the event method that gets fired.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I guess it depends on your internal processes as much as anything.

In my company, we practise peer review, and all code that gets comitted must be ‘buddied in’ by another developer, who you have to explain your code to.

Time constraints are one thing, but if I review code that has heinously long classes, then I won’t agree to the check-in.

It’s hard to get used to at first, but at the end of the day, it’s better for everyone.

Also, having a senior developer who is a champion for good class design, and is willing and able to give examples, helps tremendously.

Finally, we often do a coding ‘show and tell’ session where we get to show off our work to our peers, it behooves us not to do this with ugly code!