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by Jake Scruggs.
Original Post: When You Should Ignore Metrics
Feed Title: Jake Scruggs
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Feed Description: Ruby, Rails, Metrics, Testing, and pursuit of clean code.
Our team has been doing a bang up job of reducing our complexity through our hit list (All of our methods are ranked by Flog score and we spend some part of every iteration picking the worst methods and trying to refactor them.). But sometimes we run into a situation where we prefer a high Flog score to a low one. For instance, this bit 'o code:
def is_something?(x, y) x.foo == y.foo && x.bar == y.bar && x.blah == y.blah && # and 10 more lines of the same end
which had a Flog score in the 60s. We could have changed it to this:
def is_something?(x, y) ["foo", "bar", "blah", # and so on ].inject(true) do | a, b | a && x.send(b) == y.send(b) end end
Which gave a us a much lower score. However that first method is crazy simple. Merely glance at it and you know what it's doing. The 'less complex' method? Even an experienced ruby dev would need a moment or two. As for a new dev... I can remember a time not so long ago when I found an inject in some source code and was pretty confused even after I looked up the Rdoc. It's one of those methods that's so powerful and flexible that the documentation only seems to make sense after you understand it.
After some discussion with the team we decided that while Flog is very good at telling you which methods to inspect for badness, it is not always true that a better score makes a for better method. The same can be said for all metrics, really.
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