How often do you refactor your code so that it works better or is easier to understand? Hopefully this is a constant process where you are refining and adapting on a regular basis (note that this is not quite the same as just rewriting code for the sake of it). Recognising that a section of code “smells” and needs to be refactored is not a particularly straight-forward task, some of the signs I use to spot “smelly” code include:

• repeated blocks of the same code in different areas of the code base
• huge long “if...else if” blocks
• variable names that have no meaning or description of their contents
• function names that are not descriptive of their purpose
• code that doesn’t have supporting unit tests

Of course there will be different “smells” for different programming environments, I’m a Javascript developer and my “nose” is focussed on how my javascript code performs within web applications.

Have you sniffed your code recently to check that it doesn’t smell?