Helltime for October 19
Announcer: Now for quick hits and commentary on software development topics from around the web, the EIP web-ring brings you the stigmatized spawn of a refactory, MoffDub, and Helltime!
- Inquisitive Coder Davy Brion says that the only thing you can learn from code coverage is what you haven’t executed, and he is right on the money. This doesn’t stop me from striving for above-90% code coverage, but I don’t claim my code is bug-free at that point. The only thing coverage tells you is what you didn’t bother to think about.
Not even that. You can obtain 100% coverage and your tests can still suck. Low coverage only tells you what has been completely neglected.
- From something called The LingPipe Blog comes the futility of writing comments. It’s an old, oft-repeated-but-hardly-followed rule: comments are a code smell. But like all code smells, it isn’t always a problem. I write comments mainly to explain something later to myself that I know I won’t remember, either algorithms or (poor, forced) design decisions.
- Alberto G‘s Making Good Software blog slams the “magic architecture“. Finally.
Not only should software architects read this post, but most of you professors in academia should as well. Every time you people try to kill your students with a kamikaze death-by-PowerPoint-boxes-and-arrows lecture, remember that I am paying you to explain things to me, not to remember what it was like to sit in your private office right before your PM fired you for being unable to write a line of code because you were too busy drawing boxes in MSPaint.
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