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Title: What's that smell? - Refactor away that nasty odor
Proposer: marc_evers
Proposer: rob_westgeest
Proposer: willem_van_den_ende
Type: Workshop
Duration: 90 minutes
Description: Often, you feel there are some things just not right with the code you’re currently working wit. It is not always clear what exactly the problem is, but you can see some indicators of underlying problems. Many years ago, Extreme Programming founder and Agile pioneer Kent Beck coined the term ‘code smell’ for these indicators: a code smell is a symptom of something that’s probably not right in code or in the design, even though the root cause might not be immediately apparent.

Different code smells have names like ‘comments’ or ‘long method’. This provides you and your team members a language to talk about code quality. To reduce smells in code, we apply refactorings in small steps (refactoring = improving the design of code without changing its behaviour). Often after applying a refactoring we uncover new smells.

In this hands on session, you will practise recognizing different smells, learn a vocabulary of smells, and learn how to make code less smelly with specific refactorings. Even if you already know some smells and refactoring, deliberate practice on specific exercises will up your game.

We will provide smelly code in Java, C# and Ruby. You need to bring a laptop with a development environment installed, but don't worry: we will work in pairs so if you don't have a laptop, you can join someone else.

Roger: sounds good, once again is the limitation going to be any restrictions on the number of delegates?