The Great Software Lie

/* Temporary Fix 
 * 
 * No time write a proper blog entry, I'll get back to it later
 * Dave T 
 * 2nd Aug 2013
 */

The Splinterface

It starts off well, you have a class which has grown too complex, so you pull out some functionality into a separate class. You've pulled it out because now it is no longer fixed. It can be cyclic or non-cyclic perhaps.

All is good.

There are some parts that are shared by cyclic and non-cyclic, so you pull them out and create an interface. But over time, cyclic and non-cyclic diverge. You add a method to the interface that's only used by cyclic, and another which is specific to non-cyclic.

And eventually you can add comments to your interface that look like this

// cyclic uses these
...
// non-cyclic uses these
...
/// this one is shared by both
...

Now you have a Splinterface.

It provides the illusion of shared functionality and shared code, but that's all. It hinders change as you have lost clarity of what is and is not used. It promotes code duplication.

It's cause seems to be allied to designing interfaces based on what something is, not what services it provides.

Chances are you have 2 implementations of your Splinterface and liskov substitution is gone out the window.

Really it's time to stop, document what's going on in your code, take a long hard look, understand what should be done and fix it.

Or you could just add more code and hope for the best. If you take that approach, let me know how it all works out.

Ps- Thanks to JackH who came up with the name.

How long will that take?

OK, that's a got scope for a book. A long book.

But I remember a long time ago I did a small fixed price contract for a company. They wanted me to add some "simple" functionality to an existing app. They had the source, but no-one to do the work.

I'd never done a fixed price contract before, but I knew I'd never got any estimates right. I didn't like the idea of a fixed price contract much.

I started with - If you want a fixed price, pay me for one day to do the spec & estimates. This was (very) grudgingly accepted.

I sat down and broke down what needed to be done. With each part, I continued to break it down to the level where I knew exactly what was needed, and I knew that part would take less than 1/2 a day.

Anything longer than a Day was broken down more.

I went back with the estimate. I think it was about 3 weeks work. It's a long time ago. The manager thought I was winding him up, he'd expected about 3 days, not 3 weeks.

I had brought my list.

We went though the list piece by piece, and about 1/3 of the way through he said "Fine".

It took 12 days, not 15.

This was a task which had no unknowns for me. Each individual part was something I'd done already somewhere else, or at some other time.

Consider the amount of work that would be required to estimate a 3 month project for 6 people, working with 3 new pieces of technology that no-one on the team has used before. If you have not done something before, with a particular tool, it is possible that there's a snag. Do a simple test. Can I serialise the data as XML? Opps, the files are HOOOGE. We have to use something else.

Everyone wants accurate estimates, but no-one wants to put in the leg work to come up with the estimates.

You can of course still be wrong, but hopefully, not off by a factor of 5.

Church and State

It's been a while. Which means I've probably been having too much fun doing other stuff.

We recently saw the election of a new Pope, and I was thinking about some countries which embed their religion into the law of the land. The USA makes a big deal about separation of church and state, and I think that's a good thing.

 In software we often make a token effort to separate things. How many people remember their first program in college looking something like


            StreamReader streamReader = new StreamReader(_fileName);
            while (streamReader.Peek() >= 0) {
                string line = streamReader.ReadLine();
                if (line != null){
                    IEnumerable data = parseLine(line);
                    double sum = 0;
                    foreach (double d in data){
                        sum += d;
                    }
                    Console.WriteLine(sum);
                }
            }

So right from the start, we teach kids to bind Where we get the data, What we do with it, and Where we send the results.

Separation of functionality?

• We could get the data and pass in an iterator
• We could wrap the stream in a class which implements an IEnumerable
• We could write a separate class parse Class, and pass it in.
• We could write a separate sum() action and pass that in.
• We could return the result as an iterator, which would execute as we step through.

We could end up with 4 separate, useful small classes which could be reused and mixed to suit our needs.

We could even hand off the Loop to Linq.

Imagine the resulting code

            enumerableFile = new EnumerableFile("sample.txt");

            var results = enumerableFile.Select(

                    s => ParseStringToDoubleList.parseLine(s).Sum()

                );

Now I can write unit tests for ParseStringToDoubleList() - Ok, an appalling name, but that's an others days work.

I can use Linq's Sum function.

If I want averages instead, no problem. 

I now have a tool-kit to build functionality

First we learn to build programs, then we learn to build tools to make better programs.