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Evolutionary couplings between files reveal poor software design choices

ergoso.me

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Re: Evolutionary couplings between files reveal poor software design choices

#12

Post by jxf »

mempko wrote: post #4

I think it is a mistake to think of coupling caused by TDD to be a false positive. What this outlines really is that TDD will force you to edit two files instead of one for many changes. This is a clear indication of how TDD will slow you down.

> This is a clear indication of how TDD will slow you down.

Not shown: the part where the critical production bug you introduced was caught by your test suite, thus saving you countless hours of agony, angry customers, and lost revenue.

Re: Evolutionary couplings between files reveal poor software design choices

#14

Post by nostrademons »

jxf wrote: post #12
mempko wrote: post #4

I think it is a mistake to think of coupling caused by TDD to be a false positive. What this outlines really is that TDD will force you to edit two files instead of one for many changes. This is a clear indication of how TDD will slow you down.

> This is a clear indication of how TDD will slow you down. Not shown: the part where the critical production bug you introduced was caught by your test suite, thus saving you countless hours of agony, angry customers, and lost revenue.

Also not shown: the part where the feature that was exhaustively tested was removed a couple months after launch because requirements changed or the market shifted.

It works both ways, and probably one of the biggest skills to being an effective developer is understanding whether a piece of code you write is likely to be thrown away shortly or whether it's going to live forever and cause umpteen headaches for the maintainer. (This itself is surprisingly counterintuitive: I have seen high-priority code backed directly by an executive thrown away a week after being written because of shifting perspectives within the organization, and I've also seen a one-character typo in a "throwaway" migration script result in restoring a million+ users from tape backup.)

Re: Evolutionary couplings between files reveal poor software design choices

#17

Post by jlarocco »

__david__ wrote: post #5

That looks really interesting, and I'd love to run it on my own projects. I'm curious though, why do you think you need to make it a web service? And why tie it to github? I would like to run it on a local git repository and output the results into a local file. That seems like a good small program.

I'd also like to run this on our software, but being a web service tied to GitHub kills it for me.

Re: Evolutionary couplings between files reveal poor software design choices

#19

Post by bacongobbler »

__david__ wrote: post #5

That looks really interesting, and I'd love to run it on my own projects. I'm curious though, why do you think you need to make it a web service? And why tie it to github? I would like to run it on a local git repository and output the results into a local file. That seems like a good small program.

It's not really tied to github. If you look at the source[1] it's just a `git clone` wrapped in a shell script.

[1]: https://github.com/armish/evsrc/blob/master/scripts/evSource...

Re: Evolutionary couplings between files reveal poor software design choices

#20

Post by dkarapetyan »

Hold on. I have an interface file "interface.d.ts" and a whole bunch of other files reference it. Whenever I make changes to any files that depend-on/reference that file I of course also make changes to that file. This means that every file in my project is coupled to that file. How is that indicative of good or bad design?
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