> Labeling what they did as 'smelly' seems impolite and unnecessarily judgemental. I and my colleague follow a simple rule: Be mean to the code but friendly to

> Labeling what they did as 'smelly' seems impolite and unnecessarily judgemental. I and my colleague follow a simple rule: Be mean to the code but friendly to the person. People make mistakes, are in a hurry, don't know any better, sure. But that doesn't make the code any less smelly, buggy, crappy or hard to work with. It's much more productive and even fun to just call it what it is. But this only works in an environment where people are comfortable with each other, take responsibility and want to pragmatically improve and write better code.