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How do I deal with a team member who refuses to make comments in code?
One of my team members consistently avoids making comments in his code.His code is not self-documenting and other programmers have a difficult time understanding his code.
I have asked him several times to comment his code, however he just gives excuses or claims that he will do it later. His concern is that adding comments will take too much time and delay the projects.What argument can I present to convince him to properly document his code?
- ColinWright 14y agohttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5232553 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5232553
- taylodl 14y agoHave him do all his own code maintenance.
- bungle 14y agoI do like to read code, because I do not trust comments. Code is probably easier to read than comments. But I do like to read tutorials.
- taproot 14y agoYou don't trust them because you either write too much such that it cannot be maintained or because you don't maintain them. This failing is on you. Light comments sprinkled on code which is complex in nature is never a bad thing and improves read times.
- bungle 14y agoSo it seems. It seems that most of the programmers are just really bad at writing comments. And when they do it because they are forced, it just sucks more. I rather read the code in a first place (that's what I usually have to do regardless of the comments).