Why and how use comments effectively

A code is said to be good by the quality of comments it contains. A code with good quality of comments will save a lot of time and help to understand the code quick and better and while maintaining software and avoid regression bugs. Many products and companies do not strictly follow writing of comments in the product. So if your product has no comments or little then start writing the proper comments.

We should have Comments for

1. Classes
• What does the class do?
• Which other classes are used by it?
2. Methods
• What does the method do?
• What are the inputs and return type?
• What changes to the system is done by that method (if it is updating a database or xml file or a static variable of some other class etc)
3. Comment Complex lines
• Emphasis more on why the below line is required than what the below line does (e.g. assume the scenario in which we are iterating a list and we are incrementing the List index by one, instead of writing the obvious “Increment the index by one” write “move to the next element in the list by incrementing the index by one”)
• Write comments to only the lines which are not obvious. Comments will be required majorly for algorithms or if it’s changing the behavior of a system.
4. Give appropriate names to variables and Methods
• Giving proper names to variables and methods for what it does help to understand the obvious lines much better, avoid comments for such lines. Like if I have a variable named hasOperationFailed, by just looking it I can be sure that it’s a Boolean fields and while checking the conditions like If(hasOperationFailed) makes me understand what condition am I checking.
5. Read the comment twice after writing
• This may seem to waste time but trust me, after reading the written comment again we tend to re write the lines many times. Since the value of comments can only be said by the reader who uses it. So if the lines are simple to understand and appropriate then your efforts will be considered.

There are software’s that fetches the comments from your code and gives the output in different formats so that you can verify your comments and it can be used as a guide for what your classes and methods does.
Here are the list of some

• SandCastle
• NDoc

Other references:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/XML/csharpcodedocumentation.aspx?msg=1679454

Happy learning,
Codingsense

Steps to improve maintainability of your code

Hi,

I have seen people always telling that maintaining a product is harder. All people want to go into the product or module where its building from the scratch and pass the older code to our juniors. Why?? Is it that we want to learn new things or we don’t want to waste time in the product where we have put lots of effort to ruin it or are we afraid??

Is there any easy way to convert bad code to good code. Its not like moving a magic wand and all code is straight. First of all we should accept that its our mistake, unless we accept our mistake we keep giving hundreds of reasons to run away from it. We should have interest in making it good, plan properly and execute with determination. Here’s my story wherein I have gone through phases from good to bad and bad to good.

Two years back in Feb 2008 I started a product and was playing a role of tech lead. There were lots of eyes and concerns on that product that it will be a game changer for our company. There was a long list of feature given by our functional team, plan to combine 2 existing product functionality into one, easy navigation, and the old saying was repeated “URGENT REQUIREMENT” we were given 1 year for the first product release. So it began, planning of modules, prioritizing the features, coding standards was revisited, right features were assigned to right persons etc etc. Full team was motivated to work in the upcoming successful product.

Days passed… somewhere after 6 months an internal release was planned for the functional team and for the stakeholders. Great all were happy, I and my team got many awards, good recognition in the company and got some suggestions (also known as changes) in the software. All changes were incorporated successfully with the new features parallel development.

All was going great, until after some 5 months (1 month left for delivery) some expert gave (very late) a very good suggestion to the management for future perspective. When we received the document of changes they were huge, major changes had to be done in many of the key classes. All teammates were sort of disappointed that their feature which was done with lot of hard work and interest would be corrupted. They started blaming the management, for such changes. But all cooperated since we were the experts and it would be shame to go against the changes expected.

Now started the actual impact, changes were planned, one change would affects other flow, dependency between the classes was more, poor commented code, testers started doing stress testing on the bug tracking tool by putting more and more bugs in it.All team was under stress, daily pig meetings were started to know the status. Day by day the deadlines were nearing and the features and bugs were poured more on us.

Finally we ended up not giving the full product in the expected deadline. The days of the awards and recognition were gone. For next week I and some senior members were very busy in answering what went wrong and why we dint reach the target. Since there was intense pressure from the marketing team the product was shipped to the customers who were waiting for it. There were still more changes pitching in and we were very much tensed how to incorporate those without creating regression bugs in our product. Many bugs were reported by the customer and fixing them was a huge task for us.

On one evening was not feeling to go home so stayed till night I thougth that I and my team were responsible for the bad code and we are the one going to fix those and show our potential. I started recollecting all the mistakes that were done by me and my team and started documenting it, further found some tips across the web and added those. After analyzing the entire problem I found angle of deviation that we had been from our actual goal and plans and listed all the faults that we had done. Made up my mind to speak to the management in the early morning regarding it and get some time to refactor and restructure the code. The following steps were planned to be executed with intense care.

• Put proper comments
• Fix coding standards and project conventions
• Remove unnecessary code
• Identifying and breaking up big classes
• Breaking up big methods
• Refactor existing code
• Remove memory leaks
• Restructuring
• Write automated unit tests

After following each step properly with collecting the daily status from the team, sharing the problems and discussing some new solutions, finally it took around 7 months to complete the product.
Even though we were late by 8 months we had reached the goal properly and were ready to accept any further changes. From last year the product was sent to the market and there was very good response from our customers and the days of awards had begun again.
From next posts I am planning to go in depth of execution of each of the steps followed.

For any clarification please revert back.

Happy Coding
Naveen Prabhu