What's your #1 development tip?
As developers we continually seek to improve our game. In good teams, people share approaches and patterns.
One approach I use a lot is to write each step of functionality as a one line comment. After all the steps have been 'defined' as comments, I review and refine them - possibly changing the order and refactoring before any code has been written. Once I am happy with the comments, I find that filling in the implementation between the comments is easy.
It keeps code focused and forces me to consider the whole problem before diving straight in.
I obviously haven't invented this approach but it works for me. If you prefix the comments with TODO: in Eclipse, it populates the To Do window. Neat.
So that's one oldie that works for me. What approaches along these lines would YOU recommend?
2 comments
Your point about code reuse and copyright/licensing raises an interesting question.
If I develop a system for client A, is it OK to refactor generic parts of that code into a library that I'd reuse for client B and client C?
Is this unfair on client A who could argue they have paid for the development of the said library?
What about if client A wanted to hire another developer to extend the system but was able to do so very easily due to the hard work *I* had put in on the library of reusable functionality?
Maybe the business of software doesn't always neatly tie-in with good development practices.
