Kids Code & Computer Science

Code reviews help programmers improve their code and learn more about the software they build.

A code review is the process of examining a peer’s code to see they have adhered to the coding guidelines for the group or organisation they belong to. Constructive feedback will help the person who wrote the code learn how to improve.

What does it mean to refactor the code?

When writing code, you usually write enough to get it working, then once it works, you look for ways to split up the code into separate methods and classes. This is called refactoring.

When refactoring code, you are looking for things like duplicate code, where the same lines of code are used multiple times. You can put this code in a separate method and have the original code call the new method from each of the places where it was before. Now if you need to change the code which runs in this new method, you only have to change it in one place rather than in all of the places where it appeared before.

The other benefit to this is being able to give the method a meaningful name. Where it was a set of lines of code before, perhaps it was performing a calculation, you can name the method to say what it is doing e.g. CalculateDistanceBetweenTwoLocations().

This is also useful when you have a method which is doing lots of things, you can put them into separate methods with meaningful names. So instead of one method with many lines it could look like this:

public double GetDistanceToDestination()
{
	LocationPoint userLocation = GetTheCurrentUserLocation();
	LocationPoint destinationLocation = GetTheDestinationLocation();
	return CalculateDistanceBetweenTwoLocations(userLocation, destinationLocation);
}

What are external dependencies?

When you write code, you want it to be testable. It is hard to test it if the code itself creates new objects. You want to be able to control what objects are used in the test.
It is best to pass in these objects as variables into the parameters of the constructor. This way your code is not relying on any external dependencies.

//How not to do it
public class DependencyExample
{
	//This method creates a new instance of the NotificationService within it. This is an external dependency and makes it difficult to test.	
	public bool SendNotificationToCustomer(string emailAddress, string details)
	{
		NotificationService notifications = new NotificationService();
		return service.Send(emailAddress, details);
	}
}

//A better way to do it
public class DependencyExample
{
	//We have created a private variable for the _notifications service to it can be set and used within the methods.
	private NotificationService _notifications { get; set; }

	//This is the constructor for the class. We can set the new _notifications private variable here
	public DependencyExample(NotificationService notifications)
	{
		_notifications = notifications;
	}
	//Now it uses the private variable _notifications which was set up in the constructor
	public bool SendNotificationToCustomer(string emailAddress, string details)
	{
		return _notifications.Send(emailAddress, details);
	}
}

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