Presentations/DMS

Developing Maintainable Software

This page is a place holder for a future Thursday Night Presentation.

You really shouldn't read this, yet.

Here are some initial ideas for topics:

• Finding defects early means less overall effort
  • language selection (e.g. c++ vs objective-C, scripted languages vs compiled languages)
  • compiler options (strong typing, ZERO warnings, etc)
    • examples: SQLite
    • anecdote: turning on warnings and forcing errors: found latent defects, forced co-workers to write better (i.e. NON sloppy) code
• style
  • pretty printers
  • stupid IDEs (e.g. tabs, line endings, etc)
• #defines vs inlines and debugging
• Hungarian Notation
• parent keyword for classes
• pass by reference vs pass by address, const references
• use const!
• stdint.h
• boost libraries
• stl
• consistency of style (again? so soon?)
• modularize, make code manageable. There should be a limit to the number of lines in a given file.
• function size: fit on a screen.
• document / doxygen is it.
• let the compiler find problems:
  • typing
  • avoid setting default values, have the compiler tell you when a garbage value might get used (this is a defect)
  • avoid default in switches
• if/else -- smaller goes near the test