Refactoring Strategies For Ugly Code The Does Everything

Refactoring: Ugly Code That Does Everything

Gabe Schmidt Development Technologies, JavaScript, Node.js, Programming, Tutorial Leave a Comment

If you’ve been writing code for a significant amount of time, you’re sure to have seen the—anything but godly—“God Method.” It’s a method that performs way too many processes in the system and has grown beyond all realistic logic to become “The Method That Does Everything.”

This single unsightly method can span dozens, if not hundreds, of lines. Sometimes even over 1,000! This type of “ugly code” is an unbearable beast to maintain. This is why it’s considered a “code smell” or anti-pattern.

In this tutorial, we walk through a tangible “God Method” and step through the process to refactor it into something more manageable and human-readable. Our code is written in JavaScript for a Node.js service, but the principles apply to any language.

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The Executable Code Review

Tim Broyles Programming, Testing Leave a Comment

Testing has a bad rap. The thought of writing unit tests to exercise code with the goal of 100% code coverage can be overwhelming for many projects. The number of man-hours to set up tests, create mocks when needed, test boundary conditions, contrive odd ball test cases can take some steam out of the project. If this is the definition of test, then yes, writing these types of tests can be tedious and feel meaningless.

I am a proponent of writing tests with a narrow focus. The tests I describe here show the completion of a story or the resolution of a bug. With this narrowness in mind, the task is much less daunting. My goal now is not about code coverage, but more about quality code. With this test, I want to be able to demonstrate to myself (and to whoever is reviewing my changes), that I have successfully resolved my task.

In this blog I will talk about my suggestions for writing meaningful tests in the context of a code review.