Thursday, May 31, 2007

To Initial or not...

I've worked in places where it's the norm to leave your initials as you comment:

// IH: my comment about some function

And now I'm working in a place where it's not:

// But who wrote this in the code?

What I've discovered is that by getting your coders to add initials to their code, they will feel like they own that section of code. This could be considered an advantage - in that they'll take pride in their code sections. But also a disadvantage as, if they see a bug and someone else has their initials near it, they may be reluctant to fix that bug.

I think the initials method works better in teams where the code roles are very much well defined and the code is unlikely to be reused over and over (like for example, game code that tends to be very specific and rarely reused).

The non-initial method means that it's not my code, it's our code. This method is more suited to programmers in teams where the code is heavily reused such as in many engineering disciplines and in library code.

1 comment:

Birmingham Kitchen Renovations said...

Great reading this