Chapter 5Working with Code
“A designer knows [s]he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Effective software development requires a mastery of both the architecture and specific strategies for improving, testing, and debugging the code base.
This chapter introduces these strategies, which can be used either for correcting a defect or adding a new feature to the software. Both these activities require the use of refactoring, testing, and debugging tools and techniques.1
When we work with code, we use both synthesis (writing new code) and analysis (criticizing and revising existing code). Four central activities are associated with code analysis:
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