readme.md

Code Smell 202 - God Constant Class

Constants should be together to find them easily

TL;DR: Don't define too many unrelated constants in the same class. Don't pile up the junk together.

Problems

• Bad Cohesion

• High Coupling

• Magic Numbers

• Single Responsibility principle violation

Solutions

1. Break the contents following Real World responsibilities using the MAPPER.

Context

This is a special case of a God Object restricted only to constant definitions.

The repository can be a class, file, or JSON.

Sample Code

Wrong

public static class GlobalConstants
{
   public const int MaxPlayers = 10;
   public const string DefaultLanguage = "en-US";
   public const double Pi = 3.14159;
}

Right

public static class GameConstants
{
    public const int MaxPlayers = 10;
}

public static class LanguageConstants
{
    public const string DefaultLanguage = "en-US";
}

public static class MathConstants
{
    public const double Pi = 3.14159;
}

Detection

[X] Semi-Automatic

We can tell our linters to warn us of too many constants' definitions against a preset threshold.

Tags

• Coupling

Conclusion

Finding correct responsibilities is one of our primary tasks when designing software.

Relations

Code Smell 14 - God Objects

Code Smell 29 - Settings / Configs

Code Smell 02 - Constants and Magic Numbers

More Info

Medium

Disclaimer

Code Smells are my opinion.

Credits

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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If someone says their code was broken for a couple of days while they are refactoring, you can be pretty sure they were not refactoring.

Martin Fowler

Software Engineering Great Quotes

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This article is part of the CodeSmell Series.

How to Find the Stinky Parts of your Code