Quality in delivered software is intangible and very different from quality in physical goods. Some external attributes of quality software-free from defects and easy to maintain-are reflections of the code's internal qualities. When classes and methods are cohesive, non-redundant, well-encapsulated, assertive, and explicitly coupled, they are less prone to mistakes and far easier to debug, test, and maintain. David Bernstein asserts that paying attention to code quality helps us focus on the key principles, patterns, and practices used by expert developers. If you don't pay attention to critical code quality attributes, iterative development practices can quickly degrade code into a maintenance nightmare. Join David and your peers to take a deep dive into the code qualities that make software more maintainable and less bug friendly.

Have you heard any of these from your development staff or said them yourself? "Our software and systems are too fragile." "Technical debt is killing us." "We need more time to refactor." Having quality code is great, but we should understand why it matters and specifically what is important to your situation. Joel Tosi begins by defining and discussing some common code metrics-code complexity, coverage, object distance, afferent/efferent coupling, and cohesion. From there, Joel takes you through an application with poor code metrics and shows how this application would be difficult to enhance and extend in the future. Joel wraps up with a discussion about what metrics are applicable for specific situations such as legacy applications, prototypes, and startups. You'll come away from this class with a better understanding of code metrics and how to apply them pragmatically.

The question of how much design to do up-front on a project is an engaging one. Too much design often results in overkill, complexity, and wasted work. Too little design results in insufficient system structures that require rework, additional complexity, and wasted effort. How can we know what the right balance is? Alan Shalloway shows how to use the advice from Design Patterns coupled with the attitude of not building what you don't need from Agile. The trick is in discovering what you don't know, how it may affect you, and then how to isolate these risks in your code in a simple manner. Alan describes the essence of emergent design–that is, starting with a simple design and letting it evolve as the requirements evolve. He also demonstrates how to refactor to better designs and how this is different from refactoring bad code.

Functions are the basic building blocks of computer systems. Object-oriented classes are a way of packaging functions with shared data. Inheritance and polymorphism essentially are all about finding the right function. It’s all about functions! Get the picture? Chuck Allison explains that functions come in many varieties: static functions, polymorphic functions, generic functions, nested functions, higher-order functions, generator (aka stream) functions, coroutines, function closures, delegates, etc. Functions can handle arguments in different ways: by value, by result, by reference, by sharing, and by need, to name a few. Do you know how and when to use which? Functions should also be resource-friendly and robust should something hit the proverbial fan. Are your functions error-safe? Reusable? Maintainable? Do you know-really know-how to write a function? Come join Chuck and find out.