Pramatr Blog

Over time I’m frequently restructuring and refactoring the code I work on to improve the design and simplify many of the balls of mud I find along the way. If I break some of that code my unit tests shout at me and if they don’t my continuous integration environment shouts at me when I’ve broken one of the integration tests. One area of the code that doesn’t receive the same attention however is the documentation.

I love a well documented API as much as the next developer. I also am fighting a constant battle to improve my JavaDoc skills, trying to write to the same quality that I see in many other projects. But is excellent documentation really enough? It can’t just be excellent when it’s written it needs to be constantly maintained to this same level over time.

It’s a pretty common occurrence that I can look at a section of code and find documentation that has nothing to do with the method it belongs to. The intention revealing name sounds nothing like the documentation which describes what it’s supposed to be doing. Somewhere in the mists of time, the intention of the method and the documentation parted company; it is documentation no more it is ex-documentation. The problem here however is that there’s nothing to catch this issue. If an extra argument is added, Eclipse might display a warning telling me it’s missing from the documentation, but the actual context of the documentation can be completely wrong and I am none the wiser.

Although this incorrect documentation may seem fairly harmless to some, the reason it was supposed to be there in the first place is to the give the user of the API information on the method contract and the expected outcomes. If this information is completely wrong however it introduces confusion and also potential misuse of the API. After much wasted time and several grey hairs later I recently filed a couple of JIRA reports about popular open source frameworks which did exactly this. After my code just didn’t work and the unit tests failed, it took me a number of minutes to realise that the JavaDoc description of expected events just didn’t reflect what was actually going on in the code.

One approach to solving this problem is to include the documentation in the frequent code reviews. Code that doesn’t have documentation or has incorrect documentation can’t be considered complete, thus doesn’t pass the review. Developers need to make sure however, that they treat the documentation with the same respect that they give to their code and their tests. When dealing with documentation I’d much sooner see a method with no documentation than something that is completely wrong. I do want a good level of documentation in the code I work on but there is a very simple rule; update it or lose it.

Reviews are a widely used technique to analyse code for the presence of defects and potential improvements. Many successful teams continually review code to try to ensure a high level of quality and to constantly improve a developers ability to write good code. The arguments for and against code reviews have been made on many occasions, but one common unknown factor for many teams is the frequency at which they should take place.

Infrequent Reviews

Many teams operate on a feature complete code review. At the end of the cycle of work, several developers sit down together with the author critiquing the delivered work. What often transpires here is that due to the huge mass of code delivered, the chances of a thorough review are rendered utterly impossible. The plethora of code makes it difficult to find a starting point and thus potentially problematic code isn’t allocated the time it necessarily deserves. Any potential recommendations that come out of this kind of code may never see the light of day given the pressing work schedule (if the code was complete why are the changes necessary?). Most importantly for the team, reviewing code so infrequently can lead to demoralisation of its members.

Code reviews may pick apart the authors code; code that they have potentially sweat and cried over (ok maybe not) and worked hard to complete. Does it really make sense to save up all the potential criticism and deliver it in one skull crushing blow? Even if the criticism is perfectly valid, nobody likes to feel good about something only for it to be completely torn apart. Developers complain when customers only let them know what they actually want when they see what they don’t, is the same really acceptable for the code? If infrequent code reviews aren’t the answer, how often can code be successfully reviewed?

Email Reviews

Some teams never let the author of the code commit it to the repository. Instead, they email the code (typically in patch form) to the code owner or one of the principal reviewers. The idea behind this approach is the patches are always reviewed prior to them being committed, and the developers can work productively only focusing on the task in hand. This process has the ability to ensure that every change is scrutinised and verified to maintain the high quality standards that are set down. Having had to work with a system like this in the past, I can honestly say that it was fraught with problems and was one of the most frustrating I’ve ever worked with (I was one of the principal reviewers).

The person applying the patch quickly becomes a bottleneck in the process, how long can people really wait for the patch to be applied? What should the patch reviewer actually do with the patch, make the recommendations themselves or send an email back to the original author to apply the required changes. If multiple people are working on the code base, the chances of conflicts increase. If the patches are applied in the wrong order or peoples timing is just plain unlucky, the person applying the patch has a multitude of problems to deal with. The version control system is full of only one persons name, thus making it incredibly difficult to track down the original owner of the change. Lastly should the worst happen and the build fail………………….. guess who’s change it was that broke it?

Frequent Reviews

People like to know what and how they are doing with their work. If infrequent code reviews lead to a big bang delivery approach, then frequent code reviews take the inverse approach of small nudges in the right direction. By applying these frequent reviews, developers can deal with smaller suggestions and recommendations early in their development. Instead of developers feeling they have completed something only to be told it’s all wrong, they can be guided along the process to ensure they arrive at a right answer. The most difficult question here is; how frequent is frequent? This is a very developer specific metric.

Some developers require frequent attention and when I say frequent I mean every few hours (or more!). As developers become more experienced, this frequency typically reduces until the reviewed eventually becomes the reviewer. Depending on the type of project however, it’s still quite common for very experienced developers to like frequent code reviews. If frequent reviews become very frequent reviews, you might have unwittingly found yourself participating in quasi pair programming.

Pair Programming

Pair programming is not only a great way to develop but also to implicitly review code. A second developer sitting at the keyboard provides instantaneous reviewing of code. The second developer not only reviews the code, but also looks for potential problems and improvements to the evolving code. The second developer isn’t always necessarily the reviewer, and roles can switch between either developer during the exercise.

Having someone take over the keyboard encourages the development to be of higher quality and a second set of eyes prompts the coders to produce good code (obviously given a good pairing of developers). This instant review and feedback can actually reduce the number of bugs introduced into the system. As several developers produced the code, it also means that the team is never reliant on a single developer to address a given area of code. Pair programming is an excellent way of developing an reviewing code, but it’s not without it’s problems with some people finding the feedback is just too often.

Summary

By reducing the time between code reviews, teams can provide better guidance about the eventual quality of code and prevent storing up potential problems. The less frequent the code reviews are the more problems (especially with less experienced staff) that occur. Developers want to feel like that are doing a good job and as such then need small bits of constructive criticism often instead of lots of criticism delivered all at once. Reviewing code is best addressed frequently, providing quicker feedback, and reducing the amount of rework involved. As a developers ability increases, these issues typically subside and they become active in reviewing other peoples code.

If infrequent code reviews are problematic, are frequent code reviews the key to success?

Whilst performing code reviews recently, one of the major tasks was reviewing the tests accompanying the code. One of the most surprising discoveries, was the lack of attention paid to the tests and how regularly this was becoming an issue throughout the test code.

Test code is just as likely to contain bugs as the code it is supposed to be testing. After all, if the tests are just code, why wouldn’t it contain bugs. The possibilty of it containing bugs could actually be higher as it doesn’t have tests and in many teams isn’t treated with the same respect as the rest of the code. Tests must therefore be kept as simple and easy to understand as possible and employ the same tools and techniques available when writing tests as are used in the rest of the code.

PMD and FindBugs are great tools to identify potential problems within code, but I have only ever seen one project that applies them to the test code. PMD/CPD is a great tool to identify duplicate code blocks, but I have never seen a project apply it to test code. If duplicate code isn’t acceptable, why should it be tolerated in test code?

@Test
public void updateFirstName() {
    ...
    User updated = getUserById(expected.getId());
    assertNotNull(updated);
    assertEquals(expected.getFirstName(), updated.getFirstName());
    assertEquals(expected.getMiddleName(), updated.getMiddleName());
    assertEquals(expected.getLastName(), updated.getLastName());
}

@Test
public void updateMiddleName() {
    ...
    User updated = getUserById(expected.getId());
    assertNotNull(updated);
    assertEquals(expected.getFirstName(), updated.getFirstName());
    assertEquals(expected.getMiddleName(), updated.getMiddleName());
    assertEquals(expected.getLastName(), updated.getLastName());
}

Over time, tests will inevitably suffer from the same problems as the rest of the code. Tests become bloated, complex, duplicated and hard to understand if they are not maintained and refactored regularly just like the rest of the code. The potential problem with refactoring tests is that you are refactoring something which does not have tests to verify your changes, but testing tests is a controversial issue and can probably be better solved by conducting thorough code reviews.

Code reviews seem to be an underrated technique within test code. Having spoken to many other developers, the majority of them had never participated in any test code reviews, with only a small number having used this approach on several occasions. What makes this even stranger, is the fact that many of these developers do conduct code reviews on a semi-regular basis. This is somewhat anecdotal evidence, but it would be very interesting to see some real numbers on this subject. How many teams conduct thorough code reviews of tests and treat it with the same importance as the rest of the code?

Code without documentation is considered by many to not be code complete, but tests without documentation are a pretty common occurrence. Tests should be simple, which means documentation is not necessarily required, but does that same argument apply to the rest of the code? Tests can have intent revealing names which are sufficient in describing the intended purpose of the test and projects like TestDox can take this and turn it into readable documentation. Is this documentation sufficient, if the test fails, does it provide enough of a clue to what was actually being tested?

In the past I have found test documentation to be extremely useful when writting integration tests. This documentation described the tests not in developer terms, but instead in a use case form. By writing a simple parser, it was possible to generate documentation from the tests which would allow the QA team to understand which flows had been executed. More importantly, it also allow them to quickly understand what a individual test was doing when it failed. This documentation was written as an experiment, but it has proved extremely useful to both developers and QA when something goes wrong.

When writing tests, teams need to ensure they don’t neglect this code. Tests should be maintained, refactored, reviewed and measured to ensure the same quality as they would in the rest of their code. Tests are still code.

There are some words in software development that overtime lose all meaning. The more these words are used, and importantly, the more they are used out of context, the more the original meaning is lost. It becomes just one of those words that is fitted into a conversation without even thinking about it. One word that often suffers from this problem is refactoring.

The term Refactoring is widely used throughout software development. Martin Flower is one of the primary documenters of refactoring, and popularised it in his seminal book, Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. Many people who use the word refactoring however, have never heard of the book and more importantly don’t have a clear understanding of what refactoring actually is.

Refactoring is described as; a disciplined approach for modifying code without changing it’s externally observable behavior. This approach is focused around applying small changes to the code, each of which maintains the existing behaviour. By incrementally applying a number of refactorings, the code can be modified in a measured and controlled manner. Extreme programming embraces this approach with a rule named refactor mercilessly.

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When I first started my software engineering degree, there were plenty of people I met who simply didn’t want to be there. After a few months they’d had enough and moved onto something else, and after a couple of years the classes had halved in size. I’ve actually met a few people in the industry who behave like they don’t want to be here either, but I was hoping they were in the minority. After speaking to a former colleague however, I’ve found that the problem might be much worse than I had thought. The contradiction of the developer who isn’t interested in development.

Let me just start by saying, if you’ve got this far you really aren’t one of the people I’m talking about! Hopefully you’ll see this as a good thing .
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