Basildon Coder on what software programmers can learn from P G Wodehouse’s techniques of writing:
The first time we pinned up the printouts, I suddenly recalled a Douglas Adams foreword reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt. Adams was a great fan of P.G. Wodehouse, and explained Wodehouse’s interesting drafting technique:
It is the next stage of writing—the relentless revising, refining, and polishing—that turned his works into the marvels of language we know and love. When he was writing a book, he used to pin the pages in undulating waves around the wall of his workroom. Pages he felt were working well would be pinned up high, and those that still needed work would be lower down the wall. His aim was to get the entire manuscript up to the picture rail before he handed it in.
(Adams, 2002)
Hmm, isn’t redrafting a literary cousin of refactoring? In many ways, I think it is – so why not apply this technique to refactoring?
And we’ve made it so. We tied a piece of string horizontally across the wall – that’s our ‘picture rail’. Every week we reprint the classes we have been working on, and replace the old printouts. Then we move them up towards the string, in accordance with how happy we are with the view.
Obviously, this doesn’t replace all the other tools we have for evaluating code quality – e.g. the aforementioned metrics, unit tests, manual QA, and so on. It does, however, make for a brilliant way of tracking our subjective satisfaction with the class. Software quality tools can never completely replace the gut instinct of a developer – you might have massive test coverage, but that won’t help with subjective measures such as code smells. With Wodehouse-style refactoring, we can now easily keep track of which code we are happy with, and which code we remain deeply suspicious of.
As an added benefit, all those pages nicely cover up the hideous wall colour. Bonus!
Link via /. Take a look!
