Chapter 3. PROGRAMMING BY
INTENTION
'Tis but thy name that
is my enemy;
...
O, be some other
name!
—Romeo and
Juliet, Act 2 Scene 2 William Shakespeare
This chapter discusses programming by intention, a central idea
in XP. It means making your intent clear when you write code.
Have you ever had to work on a piece of code and
found that it was hard to understand? Maybe the logic was
convoluted, the identifiers meaningless, or worse, misleading. You
say there was documentation? Was it readable? Did it make sense?
Was it up to date with the code? Are you sure? How do you know?
The main idea of programming by intention is
communication, specifically, the communication of our intent to whomever may be reading the
code. The goal is to enable them to understand what we had in mind
when we wrote the code.
Let's look at what we need to do in order to
have our code be as understandable and intent-revealing as
possible.
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