TL;DR: Leave comments just for important design decisions. Don't explain the obvious.

Problems

• Maintainability

• Obsolete Documentation

• Readability

• Code and comments duplication.

Solutions

1) Refactor methods.

2) Rename methods to more declarative ones.

3) Break methods.

4) If a comment describes what a method does, name the method with this description.

5) Just comment on important design decisions.

Examples:

• Libraries

• Class Comments

• Method Comments

Sample Code

Wrong

<?

final class ChatBotConnectionHelper {
    // ChatBotConnectionHelper is used to create connection strings to Bot Platform
    // Use this class with getString() function to get connection string to platform

    public $id; // ChatBot Id

    function getId() { // Gets id value
    }

    function setId($id) { // Sets id value
    }

    function getString() {
        // Get Connection String from Chatbot
        // ....
    }
}

Right

<?

final class ChatBotConnectionSequenceGenerator {

    private $name;

    function connectionSequence() {
        // ....
    }
}

Detection

Linters can detect comments and check the ratio of comments/lines of code against a predefined threshold.

Relations

Refactorings

More info

Refactoring Guru

What is in a name

Comments as a bad sign

How to comment your code

Tags

• Comments

• Declarative

Conclusion

Leave comments just for important design decisions. Don't comment on a method with a bad name, rename it.

Credits

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

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If you have to spend effort looking at a fragment of code and figuring out what it’s doing, then you should extract it into a function and name the function after the what.

Martin Fowler

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This article is part of the CodeSmell Series.