TL;DR: Don't define too many unrelated constants in the same class. Don't pile up the junk together.

Problems

• Bad Cohesion

• High Coupling

• Magic Numbers

• Single Responsibility principle violation

Solutions

1. Break the contents following Real World responsibilities using the MAPPER.

Context

This is a special case of a God Object restricted only to constant definitions.

The repository can be a class, file, or JSON.

Sample Code

Wrong

public static class GlobalConstants
{
    public const int MaxPlayers = 10;
    public const string DefaultLanguage = "en-US";
    public const double Pi = 3.14159; 
}

Right

public static class MaxPlayersConstants
{
    public const int MaxPlayers = 10;    
}

public static class DefaultLanguageConstants
{
    public const string DefaultLanguage = "en-US";
}

public static class MathConstants
{
    public const double Pi = 3.14159;
}

Detection

[X] Semi-Automatic

We can tell our linters to warn us of too many constants' definitions against a preset threshold.

Tags

• Coupling

Conclusion

Finding correct responsibilities is one of our primary tasks when designing software.

Relations

More Info

Medium

Disclaimer

Code Smells are my opinion.

Credits

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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If someone says their code was broken for a couple of days while they are refactoring, you can be pretty sure they were not refactoring.

Martin Fowler

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This article is part of the CodeSmell Series.