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Code Snippet Of the Day (CodeSOD) features interesting and usually incorrect code snippets taken from actual production code in a commercial and/or open source software projects.
Pavel D inherited some… we’ll call it “software”… that helps run warehouse operations for a boiler/heating manufacturer. That software was a Visual FoxPro database.
Now, this application needs to read barcodes off of products in the warehouse. Since the laser-scanners can sometimes mis-read those barcodes, the database uses a custom check-sum algorithm.
Having automated tests for a project is a good thing, as a general rule. We can debate the broader merits of “TDD”, “ATDD”, “BDD”, “ATBDDSM”, how much test coverage is actually worth having, and if we should view our test approach as a series of metrics that must be met, instead of some guidelines that will help improve our development process.
Our first exhibit today is from Paul. It’s a JUnit test, that, well, maybe misses the point of writing unit tests:
If there's one thing more exhausting and ridiculously over-complicated than moving house, it's moving legacy apps. Something as simple as a migration to another, identically configured (in theory) server can cause unexplained breakages and weird glitches in bits of the code no current staff member has ever touched.
Pardon the clickbait headline. We’re only going to look at one method to tell if an item is in a list. A bad one.
Andrew M. inherited some software that tracks metrics. There are three general categories of metrics- “MS”, “FN”, and “CM”. Each of these categories contains a number of specific metrics, each assigned its own ID.
Scott K was cleaning up a configuration utility used by his team when he dredged up this sanity-threatening artifact:
Jul 15void Save(string path)
{
XmlTextWriter write = null;
try
{
write = new XmlTextWriter(path, null);
}
catch (IOException)
{
write.WriteEndDocument();
write.Close();
try
{
write = new XmlTextWriter(path, null);
}
catch (IOException)
{
return;
}
}
// Write stuff to the file
}