I once worked on a project that had an 11-page while loop. Refactoring such a long bit of code by factoring out methods that do one thing, and giving each method a good name that explains what the method does, can help readers of the code understand what's going on. Each method should be an understandable amount of code, preferably focused on doing just one thing, which makes it easy to name the method. Although the number of lines of code that will require depends on the situation, very long methods are often a sign that the code could be improved.

In Tame the Chatterbox: Tools and metrics for measuring code verbosity, Andrew Glover describes tools that can help detect verbose areas of code. How do you decide whether a method or class is too big, too small, or just right?