Code review, refactoring, and more...

Today I want to tell you about ensuring that code is maintainable.

Now, in our project we have a Servlet that reads in requests for graph plotting using jqPlot, and it sends these requests off to a GraphsManager which is responsible for making the data into a nice jqPlot-compatible object that can be JSON serialized and sent off to the client.

The code in GraphsManager is a little hairy -- this is because it makes heavy use of generics and some reflection to ensure that it's very general and can work with many different data sets.

Even though our code base is small right now, it still has the ability to become unmaintainable to anyone who didn't write a particular piece of code. So we want to avoid that by having regular code reviews where we share the pieces of code we've written, go through what it's doing (and why), and refactor it to make it more readable and maintainable.

In going through GraphsManager, even simple changes like replacing confusing if conditions with a helper method that has a very clear name, we can make the code a lot more readable for someone that didn't write it. We also discuss why the particular approach was taken, its pros/cons, and possible alternative solutions.

Anyway, we did this at our meeting the other day and I felt it was really constructive. In fact, I'm thinking about refactoring it soon using an entirely different approach that will make it a lot nicer. It also helps that GraphsManager has an extensive series of test cases that will ensure we don't break anything.

So the moral of this story is: Code review is good, and going through your code with someone will reveal its flaws and possible improvements you can make to it.