Take a look at the class you’re currently hacking away at in your project and ask yourself this: “If I showed another developer this class, and only this class on its own, would they understand what it does?”
Quite often, the answer is “no”. And that is a maintenance problem. Your next question then, should be: “How can I make the answer to that question ‘yes’?”
A great place to start is to take more care in how you name things. Give your class a name that clearly states what its responsibility is. Give your methods names that for commands clearly explain what action they will perform, and for queries what results they will return. Don’t forget to also think about the names of method parameters.
If something is difficult to name, consider the possibility that this is a symptom of poor design: Perhaps you’ve broken the single responsibility principle?
This may sound like trite advice, but developers are always in such a hurry. So slow down, spend a few seconds extra right now and make sure the code you write isn’t a sloppy mess, and you will be rewarded for it down the line where those few extra seconds spent could have saved you or your coworker half an hour of debugging because you misunderstood how a poorly named class/method functioned.
