Comments smell! Replace them with more expressive code. Wednesday, January 06, 2010

As already pointed out in that post, here's another code example:

...
//300 = Italy
if(aCompany.NationId == 300)
{
   ...
}
...

The comment above the if clause is definitely a code smell. If you wouldn't have that and you come back three months after releasing the software in search for a bug, you probably don't remember what's the meaning of 300, right? Therefore, refactor it by writing more expressive code:

...
if(aCompany.NationId == Nation.TypeOf.Italy)
{
   ...
}
...

The comment is completely useless now. Every developer in the team will now understand the meaning of this code without any effort. Note, such code can lower the mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) significantly.

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Credits: Hoctro | Jack Book