Skip to main content

Meaningful Names - Code Review Checklist with Example

"Names are everywhere in software". "The hardest thing about choosing good names is that it requires good descriptive skills"[1]. In my previous post, I emphasized that we should take care our code, so now let's start with naming.

Issue
Original code
Revised code
Reveals nothing
int d; //elapsed time in days
int elapsedTimeInDays;
Difficult to understand
public List<Cell> getThem()

public List<Cell> getFlaggedCells()

Specific to programmers
accountList
accounts
Number-series
public void copyChars(char a1[], char a2[])
public void copyChars(char source[], char destination[])
Noise words (indistinguishable)
customerInfo vs customer;
accountData vs account
customer, account //distinguish names in such a way that the reader knows what the differences offer
Silly made-up words
class DtaRcrd02{
 private Date genymdhms;
}
class Customer{
 private Date generationTimestamp;
}
Poor name
for(int j=0 ;  j<34 ;  j++){
   s += (t[j]*4)/5;
}
int realDaysPerIdealDay = 4;
const int WORK_DAYS_PER_WEEK = 5;
const int NUMBER_OF_TASK = 34;
for(…)
Member prefixes
private String m_dsc; 
private String description;
Interfaces prefixes
IShapeFactory
ShapeFactory
Constructors with args
Complex point = new Complex(23.0)
Complex point = Complex.FromRealNumber(23.0)
//use static factory that describe the args
Form of colloquialisms or slang
eatMyShort()
abort()
Different methods name of different classes with same code base
fetch(), retrieve(), get()
get() //pick one word for one abstract concept and stick with it
Different class name in the same code base
Controller, manager, driver
Controller
The variable names are not clear when they are used alone in a method
street, houseNumber, city, state
//Solution 1: prefix addressStreet, addressHouseNumber, addressCity, addressState
//Solution 2: create a class Address

References:

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Junit - Test fails on French or German string assertion

In my previous post about building a regex to check a text without special characters but allow German and French . I met a problem that the unit test works fine on my machine using Eclipse, but it was fail when running on Jenkins' build job. Here is my test: @Test public void shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters(){ String source = "ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ"; assertFalse(SpecialCharactersUtils.isExistSpecialCharater(source)); } Production code: public static boolean isExistNotAllowedCharacters(String source){ Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("^[a-zA-Z_0-9_ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ]*$"); Matcher matcher = regex.matcher(source); return !matcher.matches(); } The result likes the following: Failed tests: SpecialCharactersUtilsTest.shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters:32 null A guy from stackoverflow.com says: "This is probably due to the default encoding used for your Java source files. The ö in the string literal in the J...

Performance of a Data Structure

Why data structures matter The fact is that programs are all about processing data. Data structures are referred to how data is organized which affects the time of executing a program. How to measure the performance of a data structure In order to measure "how fast"/efficiency/performance of a data structure, we measure the performance of its operations. There are four basic operations including reading , searching , insertion , and deletion . A pure time consuming is not used for the measuring because it is not reliable depending on the hardware that it is run on. But instead, we use the term time complexity which refers to how many steps an operation takes. An example of how a single rule can affect efficiency Let's compare two data structures: Array and Set (with N elements). 1. Array - Reading : 1 step (because the computer has the ability to jump to any particular index in the array) - Searching : N steps (the worst case with linear search) - Inserti...

4 Remarkable Notes for JSF Apps Using HTML5

In the previous post , I've already shared with you how my team consults clients by using a HTML prototype. This post is about the used technologies for reusing the provided HTML template and communicating with backend. What is the issue when using HTML elements with Primefaces components? Primefaces is a great extension for developing JSF web apps. However, it is really frustrating in case we have to make it work with an existing HTML template. Why? - Primefaces has its own theme for styling. - Primefaces changes the HTML structure. Therefore, that would be a huge effort to use the Primefaces' components to replicate the elements of the HTML template; especially it is impossible for images drawing by " canvas " tag. That requires us to find a better approach. Since Java EE 7 (introducing JSF 2.2 included), it supports to use HTML5 elements . The idea is that JSF components don't effect the style and HTML structure, so we can easily reuse the provided HTM...

Monday vhandit #2

  Introduction to OpenLDAP directory service "A directory is a specialized database specially designed for searching and browsing, in addition to supporting basic lookup and update functions" A directory service can be local, providing a restricted context; or global, providing service to a much broader context. Curlie is a good example of a directory service. LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is a protocol for accessing directory services , specifically X.500-based directory services. OpenLDAP is an open-source implementation of LDAP. Writing system software: code comments I have read Clean Code (by Uncle Bob) and I thought that I should void comments since the code it explains its implementation itself. That is right but not always true. In this post, the author categorized the comments into 9 types. Only "trivial comments" and "backup comments" are the ones that should be avoided. I myself agree with "writing good comments is harder tha...

Regex - Check a text without special characters but German, French

Special characters such as square brackets ([ ]) can cause an exception " java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException " or something like this if we don't handle them correctly. I had met this issue. In my case, my customers want our application should allow some characters in German and French even not allow some special characters. The solution is that we limit the allowed characters by showing the validation message on GUI. For an instance, the message looks like the following: "This field can't contain any special characters; only letters, numbers, underscores (_), spaces and single quotes (') are allowed." I used Regular Expression to check it. For entering Germany and French, I actually don't have this type of keyboard, so I referred these sites: * German characters: http://german.typeit.org/ * French characters: http://french.typeit.org/ Here is my code: package vn.nvanhuong.practice; import java.util.regex.Matcher; import java.util...