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Cards for Analyzing and Reflecting on Doomed Software
Code smell monster
Similar to horror movies, there are also monsters in software development. They don’t cost you your life, but they do cost you a lot of time, nerves and in the worst case even money. God objects upon which a huge application depends, switch statements with countless entries or a parameter list which takes up half of the screen: all these are monsters we may encounter every day. What does your personal code smell monster look like? Draw it on the card! Think about measures on how you can defeat it!
More information
- The book Working Effectively with Legcay Code by Michael Feathers covers some of these topics and shows appropriate refactorings
- Refactoring Guru lists a lot of code smells and measures on how to get rid of them
- In the book Refactoring for Software Design Smells, Girish Suryanarayana, Ganesh Samarthyam and Tushar Sharma provide a taxonomy of code smells as well as many ideas for code improvement.