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by indymike
741 days ago
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If code smell is being weaponized to assault a coworkers code, then you are using the phrase incorrectly and have some cultural issues on your development team. The phrase came from Martin Fowler's book "Refactoring" https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CodeSmell.html and is intended to indicate that you might benefit greatly by refactoring that code. What I was saying is that the support organization needs to be worked on if it isn't collecting anomalies and reporting them up the line. The support staff probably wouldn't get anything done with any given bad modem ticket, but the analyst looking at support data for the week/month might notice that we've had 82 reports of defective modems of a specific model in a short time frame, and this is a new problem... one that we should probably grab a defective modem, get the vendor and take a look to make sure we don't have a big problem (the assumption might be defective hardware, but that's why you gather evidence and investigate further). |
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The description in the link you provided is pretty wishy-washy:
>"smells don't always indicate a problem."
Okay, so does it smell like flowers or does it smell like shit?? It's a stupid term, and yes, it's been abused by programmers that often think it makes them seem smarter than they are.
Maybe "code stink" would be a better designation for code that's actually a problem. But even that would be stupid and I'd never use it to describe code. Putting down someone else's code as "smelly" is a great way to make a team dysfunctional. And code is often messy for plenty of good reasons (PoC code is perfectly fine if it's messy, no reason to call it "smelly"), there's no reason to anthropomorphize it and assign it a "smell". It's just a rude way to talk about code.
Your second paragraph is more reasonable.