I’m a fan of Flog. I like using it every now and then to make sure that I’m not getting too complex, trying to be clever, or setting myself up for testing failure. Typically these are things I look to my MILF slaying pair for guidance, but sometimes Flog can be just as good.

As a relative newcomer to Ruby, I’m still in the process of learning to identify code smells, poor design and needless complexity. I’m sold on the “readable code is better” idea so I try to keep that in mind as I’m implementing some piece of functionality. Over at Integrum, where I work, we pair on everything each day, save for the occasional sick day. Today I was working alone and was reviewing some code that my pair and I had wrote about a week earlier. It was complex, and I feel that we made a compromise with the idea that the “ugly” working code was good enough for what we needed at the time, but it was ugly enough that I remembered to revisit it.

Flog Builds Confidence

When I really started looking at the code my intuition told me that it needed to be re-factored. I knew that it could be improved, but I suppose I’ve been in the pair mindset so heavily since I’ve been here that I did not immediately jump in and fix things. However, when I ran Flog and saw the comparatively high scores for two complex methods I had been investigating, I had that supportive “yea I agree” feeling that I usually get from pairing. Flog helped push me over the threshold, from “maybe I should change this” to “this should be changed”.

This isn’t to say that I wouldn’t have changed it without Flog, but it gave me that extra confidence in knowing that I was on the right track. The direct benefit was that the code is now more readable and easier to test. Indirectly I’ve added another point to my mental Ruby experience score and will be more inclined to follow my intuition in the future.