Stewart Stremler wrote:
And as for comments, well, great comments are hard, and good comments
require effort; but writing a bunch of crappy comments and dropping in
a bunch of templates merely improve the metric (comments::code) without
adding value doesn't help.
Yeah, Smalltalk folks in general tend to frown on comments. They see it
as a sign that a method is complex. Complexity is sometimes warranted
(in which case comments are insisted upon, rather than frowned upon),
but most often not. The preferred approach is to have short methods with
descriptive names (this is helped tremendously by the way Smalltalk
method names work when you have multiple parameters).
So when the XP guys rapsodize about how they can go twice as fast and have
half the defects and they don't need to leave behind no stinkin'
deliverables, I get a knot in my stomach and wonder what makes them so
different from all the other bags of magic beans I've seen before.
Is that so bad of me?
No, but...
I think you're listening to guys who claim to be advocating XP, but who
haven't bothered to read any of the XP books. XP leaves behind a lot of
artifacts -- story cards, task cards, test suites, etc. -- and, presumably,
working code. These make for nice deliverables (with a little polish,
perhaps).
Don't forget documentation. People think that XP says not to do
documentation, but it doesn't. It says to push off writing any
documentation until it's going to be used or the end of the project,
whichever comes first. The idea behind this is that the projects, the
code, etc. change over time and you end up with all this "documentation"
which is inaccurate the first time it is actually used (raise your hand
if you've not experienced this phenomenon before ;-) or worse still you
spend all this time refactoring documentation to keep it up to date.
--Chris
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