Bunk and Rambling

Integrated Development Environments are constantly evolving, but I have noticed that many are reaching a level of maturity that signifies a need for them to begin introducing questionable features to enable them to continue to display long term viability. For this reason, I think it is time that IDE’s such as Netbeans, Eclipse and IntelliJ look to introduce a variation on Clippy the Microsoft Office Assistant to help developers to write better code.

While pair programming helps you to write high quality code in an efficient manner there are times that a pair of programmers will end up going off on a tangent and working on something that ultimately ends up not being necessary. To counter the unbridled enthusiasm that usually causes this to occur I give you Yagni, the Development Assistant.

Yagni’s role within the IDE is to monitor a developer’s work and provide warnings and advice about bad practices and code smells. As seen below, Yagni pops up when a class is being written before the corresponding unit test.

Yagni can also step in when it thinks that you have gone off track for too long working on a development spike and try to convince you to move back on the task of writing production code.

The code intelligence of Yagni is extensive to ensure that you don’t go off track and start writing code for framework, one of the most common time wasters in software development. Here Yagni steps up and reminds you in no uncertain terms that:

Sadly, Yagni is still a work in progress so please feel free to provide some comments as to what Yagni should do to make your coding experience more fruitful. Alternatively, there might be other IDE assistants that you can think of; one example that I can think of is Microsoft Development Mentor. In the case of Microsoft Development Mentor, maybe he could sit around waiting for you to write application logic in standard code and suggest that you write it in a stored procedure instead, with a goal of helping you to keep your code difficult to understand and maintain. There is no doubt that the opportunities are endless…