ByteDecoder/onuro

Classes and modules are the units of reuse and release. It is therefore considered good practice to annotate every class and module with a brief comment outlining its responsibilities.

Example

Given

class Dummy
  # Do things...
end

Reek would emit the following warning:

test.rb -- 1 warning:
  [1]:Dummy has no descriptive comment (IrresponsibleModule)

Fixing this is simple - just an explaining comment:

# The Dummy class is responsible for ...
class Dummy
  # Do things...
end

A class that publishes a setter for an instance variable invites client classes to become too intimate with its inner workings, and in particular with its representation of state.

The same holds to a lesser extent for getters, but Reek doesn't flag those.

Example

Given:

class Klass
  attr_accessor :dummy
end

Reek would emit the following warning:

reek test.rb

test.rb -- 1 warning:
  [2]:Klass declares the writable attribute dummy (Attribute)

A candidate method for the Missing Safe Method smell are methods whose names end with an exclamation mark.

An exclamation mark in method names means (the explanation below is taken from here ):

The ! in method names that end with ! means, “This method is dangerous”—or, more precisely, this method is the “dangerous” version of an otherwise equivalent method, with the same name minus the !. “Danger” is relative; the ! doesn’t mean anything at all unless the method name it’s in corresponds to a similar but bang-less method name. So, for example, gsub! is the dangerous version of gsub. exit! is the dangerous version of exit. flatten! is the dangerous version of flatten. And so forth.

Such a method is called Missing Safe Method if and only if her non-bang version does not exist and this method is reported as a smell.

Example

Given

class C
  def foo; end
  def foo!; end
  def bar!; end
end

Reek would report bar! as Missing Safe Method smell but not foo!.

Reek reports this smell only in a class context, not in a module context in order to allow perfectly legit code like this:

class Parent
  def foo; end
end

module Dangerous
  def foo!; end
end

class Son < Parent
  include Dangerous
end

class Daughter < Parent
end

In this example, Reek would not report the Missing Safe Method smell for the method foo of the Dangerous module.

A class that publishes a setter for an instance variable invites client classes to become too intimate with its inner workings, and in particular with its representation of state.

The same holds to a lesser extent for getters, but Reek doesn't flag those.

Example

Given:

class Klass
  attr_accessor :dummy
end

Reek would emit the following warning:

reek test.rb

test.rb -- 1 warning:
  [2]:Klass declares the writable attribute dummy (Attribute)