Code Smell 66 — Shotgun Surgery

Say it only once

Maximiliano Contieri

Published in

Dev Genius

2 min readApr 5, 2021

Problems

Bad Responsibilities Assignments
Code Duplication
Maintainability
Single Responsibility Violation.
Copy-pasted code.

Solutions

Refactor

Sample Code

Wrong

Right

Detection

Some modern linters can detect repeated patterns (not just repeated code) and also while performing our code reviews we can easily detect this problem and ask for a refactor.

Conclusion

Adding a new feature should be straightforward it our model maps 1:1 to real world and our responsibilities are in the correct places. We should be alert for small changes spanning in several classes.

More info

Shotgun surgery - Wikipedia

Shotgun surgery is an antipattern in software development and occurs where a developer adds features to an application…

en.wikipedia.org

Shotgun Surgery

Making any modifications requires that you make many small changes to many different classes.

refactoring.guru

Shotgun Surgery: What It Is and How to Stop It - NDepend

I really love the name "shotgun surgery" for describing a code smell. It's sort of an interesting mix of aggressive and…

blog.ndepend.com

The Shotgun Surgery Code Smell - DZone Java

Code Smells are similar in concept to development-level anti-patterns. Sometimes in our code, we introduce a code smell…

dzone.com

Duplication is the primary enemy of a well-designed system.

Robert Martin

Software Engineering Great Quotes

Sometimes a short thought can bring amazing ideas.

medium.com

This article is part of the CodeSmell Series.

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The code smells bad. Let’s see how to change the aromas.