Refactoring in Ruby

Chapter 5. Measurable Smells

The smells in this chapter are similar. They’re dead easy to detect. They’re objective (after you decide on a way to count and a maximum acceptable score). They’re odious.

And, they’re common.

You can think of these smells as being caught by a software metric. Each metric tends to catch different aspects of why code isn’t as good as it could be. Some metrics measure variants of code length; others try to measure the connections between methods or objects; others measure a distance from an ideal.

Most metrics seem to correlate with length, so we tend to worry about size first (usually noticeable as a Large Module or Long Method). But if a metric is easy to compute, we’ll use it as an indicator that some section ...