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

[Snippet] CSS - Child element overlap parent

I searched from somewhere and found that a lot of people says a basic concept for implementing this feature looks like below: HTML code: <div id="parent">  <div id="child">  </div> </div> And, CSS: #parent{   position: relative;   overflow:hidden; } #child{   position: absolute;   top: -1;   right: -1px; } However, I had a lot of grand-parents in my case and the above code didn't work. Therefore, I needed an alternative. I presumed that my app uses Boostrap and AngularJs, maybe some CSS from them affects mine. I didn't know exactly the problem, but I believed when all CSS is loaded into my browser, I could completely handle it. www.tom-collinson.com I tried to create an example to investigated this problem by Fiddle . Accidentally, I just changed: position: parent; to position: static; for one of parents -> the problem is solved. Look at my code: <div class="modal-body dn-placeholder-parent-positi...

JSF 2 - Dynamically manipulating the component tree with system events

Let's suppose we want to modify the metadata (attributes)  of elements such as render , requried , maxlength but we do not define in JSF tags. The manipulating components can be conducted in Drools  files, for example. How could we do? I think that is what we need to change something of component tree during JSF life-cycle. JSF supports event handling throughout the JSF life-cycle. In this post, I use two events: postAddToView for scanning components tree and preRenderView for manipulating the meta of components before rendering to GUI. I modified my own project from previous post for this example. This is my first further JSF trying out with the project as I said before. :) We define the tags f:event below the form - a container component of the components which we want to work on. The valid values for the attribute type for f:event can be found from tag library document  of JSF 2. <!DOCTYPE html> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" x...

Coders are NERDS | Learning English with Podcast

Let's learn three English vocabulary words based on real-life context through a humorous video about the life of software coders, especially at big tech companies when they work from home. Credit to Joma Tech. 🤓

BIRT - Fix the size of an image

I use a dynamic image as a logo my report in pdf. At the beginning, I use table to align the logo in left or right. I meet a problem with some images with a large width or height. My customer requires that the logo should be displayed in original size. These following steps solves my problem: 1. Use Grid instead of Table 2. Set Grid "Height" is 100%  and "Width" is blank 3. Set "Fit to container" for images are "true". Download the the template here .

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...