Ahhhh Uncle Bob, You always enlighten my week in some way!
This week in the clean coders I delved into chapters 5 & 6. These chapters talked about Test Driven Development (TDD) and Practicing respectively. These chapters really didn’t introduce these topics to me as these are things I’ve known about for a while but, they shed some light on a few areas that I haven’t heard of before.
In the topic of TDD Uncle Bob made a statement about TDD I hadn’t truly thought of before – Courage. He basically stated that when you follow proper TDD practices you gain courage to go back and fix code. The reason for that is because, we will know whether or not we actually broke the code or not when trying to “fix” it. I’ve worked on a few projects now that I went the wayside of TDD for two reasons, I didn’t really understand it and it seemed like a waste of time. However, even though these were small projects mainly going to be used by myself, when I come across a bug (That wouldn’t have been there in the first place if I’d TDDed) I am always nervous to touch the function or method again. I find myself between this state of “Well did the bug really hard the ability of the software to work? Should be fine.” or “During normal use this shouldn’t happen, I can leave it be.”. Where as if I had written tests I wouldn’t be fearful at all to rewrite and “fix” old code!
Chapter 6 delved into the topic of practice. Uncle Bob seemed to mostly talk about practice in the terms of physical speed of writing code. Like, writing the same method over and over to gain speed of being able to write methods. I’m not going to lie, this is something I’ve done. I’ve worked hard creating code snippets and practicing using key-binds to be able to get the most out of my workflow. The less time I spend writing “boiler-plate” the more time I actually get to be solving the hard problems (aka the “Fun stuff”).
Practicing your workflow and making sure you can code really quickly and you are good with the tools you are using is an important thing. However, one thing I feel Uncle Bob missed is practicing our language specific knowledge. I know for myself and the projects I’ve worked on, every time I don’t have to refer back to documentation is major time saved. One thing I’m not saying is that we should spend major amounts of time learning the deep dark corners of each language. What I am saying is that you should know how to do semi basic things in the language you are working in, without referring to documentation. I remember working on a PHP project where I was doing a massive amount of string manipulation and find/replace type stuff. The first few pieces of code I wrote, I would google my problem and typically find a similar solution to what I needed on Stack Overflow. I would then go to the PHP documentation and see what it had to say to try and figure out the rest of my problem. I found that I kept coming back to the same 4 or 5 functions so I decided to commit these to memory and really try and understand the full capabilities and “hackish” things you could do with each. The 3 or so hours I took reading the documentation about string manipulation probably saved me a week or two worth of work over the projects duration. I’d say that’s worth it!
All in all another great week from The Clean Coder. I am really enjoying this book and cannot wait to see what Chapters 7 & 8 have in store! Thank you Uncle Bob for this awesome book.
From the blog CS@Worcester – Tyler Lundstrom by CS@Worcester – Tyler Lundstrom and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.