re: development cycles

[vaaaska]

I think this is the right place to ask this question.

Not knowing so myself, I'm curious if it's normal to have a period during development towards the end where you go back in and reduce the amount of code you've written. It seems like a logical step. Certainly, there is a phase where you set out debugging with testers and such, but I'm more curious if there is another phase where people go back into the code and reduce the heck out of it.

This is what designers do - up until the last minute they tweak and alter and then somebody comes along and takes it from them whether it's ready or not (another reason why there is so much bad design in the world).

Or, do professional programmers get it right the first time basically? (I would think that's partly based upon age/experience too)

[drawmack]

First of all: once code enters testing the only changes to it should be bug fixes as changing anything else could cuase bugs to crop up, so if you're trimming code post testing you have to go through the entire testing stage again.

Secondly: There are two types of testing. Black box testing, which is what people classically think of as testing, where someone is using the program without seeing the source code. This type of testing finds errors that allow bad data through or in some way mishandle data. Then there is clear box testing. This is where another programmer reads your code and looks for things like verbosity, wasted code, functions that are never called and special case handleing.

So to answer the original question, clear box testing would be the stage where this is done. Though in my experience noone code trims anymore, otherwise I wouldn't be installing programms off of 3 - 5 CDs.

[Jinks]

icode trim all the time 😃 but then i dont know what the hell im doing anyway..