A Quantum Immortal

I wrote in a previous post about a few refactorings meant to eliminate code duplication. I was reminded recently this principle has a name – DRY, which stands for Don’t Repeat Yourself, and should be applied everywhere.

Eliminating duplication, while a noble task, is not the only refactoring one should practice and apply. Breaking up large pieces of code into exceedingly smaller pieces is also important. It makes your code more readable to yourself and to other developers, and also make merges much easier to accomplish – nothing is more terrible than looking at a huge merge of a huge method or class and having to guess what combination of the versions is the correct one.

Here are a couple of important tips/techniques to make your code more manageable:

Tip I – Group expression into methods

It doesn’t matter if it’s code you wrote or stumbled on. Whenever you get the chance, select a few statements in a long method, use Resharper’s Extract Method refactoring, invent some name to describe what this group of statements does, and voila – you’ve shortened the original method. It’s easier to understand and maintain, and now the new method can be called and tested on its own. This technique can turn huge 200-line monster methods into responsible, comprehensible 15-liners.

Ideally you’d want to use this refactoring on a bunch of statements that actually have a logical cohesive meaning together. Even if that’s not the case, usually you’ll be better off with the extracted method. One notable exception – when the set of statements you’d refactor will lead to a method will multiple out parameters. Then you’d still have to declare these variables in the calling code, and your gain greatly diminishes.

Tip II – Group methods into classes

You’ve all seen the huge classes with dozens of methods. Hell, Tip 1 above is all about creating even more methods! Well, once you feel a class has grown too much, you should try to spot groups of methods that have related functionality. Perhaps most methods in the group are used only by a single method, but nowhere else. In this case, if you move all these methods away to a new class and make them private members of that class, their absense will certainly not be missed in the original class – it only uses the one method anyway (be sure to keep it public, of course). Like in the previous tip, you want to try and find groups of methods that have a common logical function in order to use this refactoring. However, even if you can’t find a common function to these methods, they will still be better off in another class.

While Resharper does have a Move Method refactoring, in some cases it’s better to just cut and paste, especially when you move a bunch of methods together, with the data members they use and all.

Tip III – Reduce nesting level

This will not shrink your methods by a lot, but it will make them more managable. Nesting level implies context, which you have to maintain in your head when you are processing code. When is this code called? Only if 5 different if statements happen to succeed. It’s painful on the eye.

A useful refactoring for this is Resharper’s “Invert If”. It takes a convoluted piece of code such as

public void ProcessUserInput(string name)
{
   if (name != null)
   {
      int id = FindIdByName(name);
      if (id != 0)
      {
         if (TryToStoreName(name, id))
         {
            Console.WriteLine("Stored {0}, {1}", name, id);
         }
      }
   }
}

And beautifies it into

public void ProcessUserInput(string name)
{
   if (name == null) return;
 
   int id = FindIdByName(name);
   if (id == 0) return;
 
   if (TryToStoreName(name, id))
   {
      Console.WriteLine("Stored {0}, {1}", name, id);
   }
}

Much easier to follow (the difference is highly evident in methods with 5 nesting levels or more – these acutely need this refactoring).