Five Habits of Highly Effective Software Developers

Posted by Floyd Marinescu on Aug 24, 2006

Sections

Process & Practices,

Architecture & Design,

Development

Topics

Programming ,

Training / Certification ,

Ruby ,

Methodologies ,

.NET ,

Java

Tags

OOP ,

Patterns

What are some of the code-level practices of highly effective developers? Robert Miller wrote a detailed article on  Java.NET covering 5 practices which could apply to any language, including minimalist constructors, methods with clear focus and intent, minimizing logic in mutating methods, and minimizing dependendies between behaviour methods.  Miller's article frames the practices as making developers more effective, and thus more profitable.

The habits, summarized below, are:

Habit 1: Constructor Performs Minimal Work. Ideally, its constructor will only load data into its instance variables using the constructor's parameters
Habit 2: Methods Clearly Convey Their Intent. Long and descriptive method names help developer teams quickly understand the purpose and function of their software.
Habit 3: An Object Performs a Focused Set of Services. Each object in the software to be focused on performing a small and unique set of services. Objects that perform a small amount of work are easier to read and more likely to be used correctly because there is less code to digest.
Habit 4: State-Changing Methods Contain Minimal Behavior Logic.   Intermixing state-changing logic with behavior logic makes the software more difficult to understand because it increases the amount of work happening in one place.
Habit 5: Behavior Methods Can Be Called in Any Order. Ensure that each behavior method provides value independent of any other behavior method.

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   Note my reply on the site

   by Matthew Adams

   It's over on the article's site:
   today.java.net/pub/a/today/2006/08/24/five-habi...
   
   --matthew

   Reply

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