Under the hood and working with .Net, TDD, Software Design, and Agile Stuff
I'm naming a new code smell today, "Obsessive Tracing." You know exactly what I mean. If you see a long method or class with a *lot* of Debug.WriteLine("1") or Debug.WriteLine("I'm in here now!") methods sprinkled throughout the code, it's a good bet the code smells to high heaven. Those trace statements are in there because the code is prone to breaking and hard to understand.
The point of a code smell is to recognize a problem so you can begin to move in a different direction. I'm not sure what you do with legacy code, but with new code the key in my opinion is a well factored solution for ease of understanding and strong unit testing. Excessive amounts of debugging often means your unit testing isn't granular and comprehensive enough. Excessive debug statements might also mean a developer could benefit from reading up on the capabilities of their debugger.
Geek points for nailing the movie line in the title. No Chris Fields you don't count, that one's too easy for you.
About Jeremy D. Miller
Jeremy began his IT career writing "Shadow IT" applications to automate his engineering documentation, then wandered into software development because it looked like more fun. Jeremy previously worked as a systems architect building mission critical supply chain software for a Fortune 100 company and learned agile development practices as a .Net consultant at ThoughtWorks, one of the pioneers of agile development. Jeremy is the author of the open source StructureMap (http://structuremap.sourceforge.net) tool for Dependency Injection with .Net and the forthcoming StoryTeller (http://storyteller.tigris.org) tool for supercharged FIT testing in .Net. Jeremy's thoughts on just about everything software related can be found on his weblog "The Shade Tree Developer" at http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller, part of the popular CodeBetter site. Jeremy is a Microsoft MVP for C#.
