This week, the topic that I wanted to focus on was design smells. I wasn’t confident in my own knowledge of what exactly design smells were or how to implement that knowledge into my designing of code. So I found a blog post by Sandor Dargo, in which he reviews the book Refactoring for Software Design Smells. Dargo’s blog has a background in software-design related book reviews, so it seemed like a good place to learn a little more about what design smells were.

The review covers a lot of the fundamentals of design smells, much like what we did in class, although it focuses more on what design smells affects within software design, such as understandability and reliability. I really liked this way of thinking about design smells, as simply learning them felt a lot more abstract to me, but showing what it affects and how it can harm the design of software makes it a little bit more understandable, to me at least. The first half of the post talks about the concept of technical debt, and the later half is more on the design smells. Obviously these both impact each other, but I liked his breakdown of technical debt as being similar to taking out a loan to get something done that needs to be done, but if you don’t keep up with that debt you will get further and further into debt until you fail. I think it is a very good analogy to technical debt, and aided in my understanding of the topic as a whole. The final part of the post focuses on common issues that are caused by design smells and how these seemingly insignificant things can make your code less and less usable over time.

I found this review to be extremely useful in my understanding of what design smells are and why code refactoring is so important. The most important aspect of this post to me was the discussion on technical debt. It is such an important aspect of software design to consider, as is allows us to make quick-and-dirty solutions when we need to, but also tells us how important it is to go back and change the code before it gets out of hand. We must design code in a way to make it as easy to use as possible, and easy to build on in the future. If we are able to properly document our code, allow for reusability within the system, and make use of abstraction and encapsulation to make code as simple to follow as possible, we can create an environment that can significantly increase not just our own workflow, but the workflow of any collaborators, or anyone who needs to make use of our code. It is our job as designers to make sure that as time goes on, our code gets easier to work with, especially as complexity increases to meet the demands of our clients.

Source:

https://www.sandordargo.com/blog/2021/01/30/refactoring-for-software-design-smells

From the blog CS@Worcester – Kurt Maiser's Coding Blog by kmaiser and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Software developers play a critical role in creating to deploying an application, the amount of works and effort that they have to put in is tremendous. Therefore, mistakes are inevitable. According to Hackernoon, a well-known blog for developers, there are seven pitfalls that developers should limit during the development and the solutions.

Planning fallacy (Time creep)
Time is essential while creating a product. Developers want to ship their applications on time and also not taking too much time to develop. The managers want them to meet the deadline without hitting any barriers. The best way to prevent time-consuming as the deadline loomed is to have the best time management. By doing so, we avoid running out of time at the end of the developing cycle and deploy the product on time.

Insufficient budget

Budgets, like time creep, can easily be overloaded if they are not kept in check. Time itself will exceed the cost since time is money. However, We don’t talk enough about this issue and it’s hard to find a good approach to solve the problem. Hence, limiting the time of development and the delays would eventually lead to narrow the cost of production.

Conflicting Communication

Since the pandemic started, we all feel like human interacting and communication have gotten less appreciated. We spent countless hours on video call conferences, did not have face-to-face interactions, and made the connection between us felt apart. As developers, we spend the entire day on laptops, and previously we already get so little human communication unless when we discuss the problem with our team. Pandemic widened that gap between developers and led to miscommunication between each team member. Working remotely makes it harder to express our ideas and thoughts to our team members. As the perception is not demonstrating enough, this might lead to communication breakdown and ultimately causes conflict among team members.

Security

Security has always been a big deal in this industry and especially to developers. Security vulnerability always exists. It’s part of software developer life. Software is among one of the most important things when it comes to secure user’s data. Billions of users have been affected by massive data breaches each year, showing that even big companies can sometimes make mistakes in developing the product. All we can do to minimize the risk of data breaches is to ensure the credibility of that software. By testing as often as developers could, they help cut back that possibility.

Many of the things in this blog is what I think is consequential to developers. More topics need to be covered, but personally, time, money, and security are needed to deserve more attention than the rest while developing a product in the Computer Science industry or in any other industry.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Nin by hpnguyen27 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The book Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye gives great solutions/patterns for problems often faced by software developers, mainly apprentices or beginners of the craft. I have enjoyed reading up to where I have gotten so far (Chapter 1 plus 2-6 introductions) and it has taught as well as clarified many ideas and methods. One thing I have never thought of is how your first language will affect how you will think and learn other languages in the future. While this may be the case, the more diverse knowledge you have, the more you will improve upon this fact. For example (given by the book), people who are more comfortable with object-oriented languages should explore functional languages. This will broaden your understanding and problem solving. Another pattern I found interesting was the Be The Worst pattern. This discusses your environment and its relation to your growth. Being on a team where you are the best or most skilled does not give you much room or motivation to improve as you will not be learning from your peers. It suggests keeping yourself in an environment/team where you are the least skilled. This forces you to catch up to your teammates so that you don’t hold them back as well as forces the habits, ideas, and information of your higher skilled teammates upon you. A few patterns that addressed things I already “knew” but clarified the process at which I should take are Expand Your Bandwidth and Reading List. If you want to be a software developer then you should already know that you will be constantly learning. Expand Your Bandwidth gives solutions on how to learn more than what your job teaches you. It gives examples such as joining online academic courses, following influential developers on social media, contacting authors and more. This gives you a starting point from which you can come up with your own ways of learning or just to boost you in the right direction. The other pattern, Reading List, gives great methods on organizing your book backlog. The first suggestion is to not only keep a list of books you wish to read but the ones that you have read as well. This allows you to keep track of the books you’ve read from which you can review and find gaps or trends in your learning. This can direct you/help decide what you should read next. The pattern also suggests that you keep your book list as a priority queue. If you find a book on a topic that would be more useful or has a higher urgency then put it at the top of the list. If the bottom of the list gets to the point where you will probably never read the books in those spots then thats okay because it clearly is not a priority. I like the way this book structures these patterns too. The authors organize these patterns into Context, Problem, Solution and Action. This makes it easier to understand rather than if they were just put into normal paragraphs.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Austins CS Site by Austin Engel and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Throughout this semester, I will be reviewing several different apprenticeship patterns from the first six chapters of our in class textbook. For my very first post, I decided to review the first pattern covered which was “Your First Language.” For many of my friends and classmates (including myself), Java was the first language learned. When we are first starting out learning programming, the book tells us that it is incredibly valuable to master our first language or two rather than try to learn a bunch of different languages at once. I am a firm believer in this notion as well simply because, with my knowledge in Java, I am able to translate to other languages fairly easily. The book explains that trying to learn all the languages instead of one for when a programmer is just starting out is not ideal mainly because it will end up causing more confusion than learning. If I am great at my first language, it is generally not too difficult to solve a problem in that language and then translate it to a new language after the fact. A great quote the book uses to describe this is by Alfred North Whitehead, and it reads, “by relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.” It definitely is a bit concerning to me when I see job applications stating I need to know certain languages or programs that use specific languages, but my original background in Java has proven to be extremely helpful in learning how to use those other languages. All the work I put into learning Java has helped me with my understanding of all languages, and for the most part, I just end up needing to teach myself the slight syntax differences between them all. This portion of the textbook spoke to me strongly because I have often thought about what would have happened if I had learned a different language for my first language. I see now that it most likely would not have changed anything, and that makes me happy!

From the blog CS@Worcester – Tim Drevitch CS Blog by timdrevitch and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.