Let me start of by publicly admitting this, I am have OCD (Obsessive-compulsive disorder) when it comes to code. My code must be clean and it must be uniform. And because I am a ReSharper lover my disorder is even more drawn out.
Over the past month or so while I have been fixing bugs in our application I have been making 'harmless' changes to the various class files that I have been editing. These changes involve removing dead using blocks, removing dead code, removing unneeded 'this' usages, making various improvements to the code, so on and so forth. None of these were major and none should (wish we had tests to prove this) affect the quality of the application. But since ReSharper has highlighted these various issues I thought I would change them.
Boy was that a bad idea. Last week the team I am on had a directive to merge 3 different branches into our trunk and this needed to happen ASAP. What I found out real early in our merge was we had TONS of conflicts or merge warnings because of all my 'changes' (VS Team's merge tool is not the best). Almost all of issues were easy to merge, but the fact that we had to spend a ton of extra time on them was waste (should read these [book 1, book 2] for more information on removing waste). We were able to get through the merge just fine, but it took longer then anticipated.
The moral of the post is this. If you have OCD in respect to code and you are going to be doing merges, try to control your OCD. If not your merges are going to be much more painful and take much longer then needed.
Till next time,
Posted
02-21-2008 1:34 PM
by
Derik Whittaker