Third Shelf

Recently, I had to embark on a huge refactoring. Of course, one change leads to another change, which leads to another and so on… After a while a lost myself in the chain reaction and had to put a stop to it. By reminding myself to make one small change and then run the unit tests, it was a lot easier. The way it ought to be.

But, now I was building up a whole list of pending changes as I moved through the current refactoring process and somehow had to remember all of the changes that I had made. This is where I stumbled upon a great thing that helped me out. I call it the Code Changes sheet.

It is a simple document that a co-worker drew up as a to-do list, which I took and then changed slightly. It has space to simply write down items, tick them off and then add a date when all the changes were checked in. It’s a great thing to have when the time comes to write that nice ‘little’ check-in comment.

So, feel free to download the code changes sheet here.