> Just today I announced a sweep through all of the TODO's and to either turn them into issues, stories or remove them.
I think it makes sense to get rid of inline TODOs.
On new unshipped projects I've gone down the road many many times where it starts with a TODO comment above a chunk of code and then it turns into a few lines of context or a summary of my thoughts. Then comes linking to references, recapping my thought process on the "why", potentially writing a couple of versions of the code and keeping them commented out, or even having a chat with a friend over IRC and copy / pasting the conversation next to the code.
Now you open a file and suddenly it's your code mixed with a massive brain dump of notes, research and a ton of other things that have no business being in your code base and of course your intent is to remove all of that stuff once you get the well thought out implementation but eventually all of this stuff builds up. Then it happens across multiple files and eventually it becomes really hard to figure out what you need to do.
Putting all of that stuff into a kanban board has been a huge win for me. Now I just drop all of that contextual info into a "research" list and I pick things off that list when I'm ready to really do them.
A made a video about this process a while back at https://youtu.be/HHOkcCqsipE?t=77. It shows an example of the before and the after.
I think it makes sense to get rid of inline TODOs.
On new unshipped projects I've gone down the road many many times where it starts with a TODO comment above a chunk of code and then it turns into a few lines of context or a summary of my thoughts. Then comes linking to references, recapping my thought process on the "why", potentially writing a couple of versions of the code and keeping them commented out, or even having a chat with a friend over IRC and copy / pasting the conversation next to the code.
Now you open a file and suddenly it's your code mixed with a massive brain dump of notes, research and a ton of other things that have no business being in your code base and of course your intent is to remove all of that stuff once you get the well thought out implementation but eventually all of this stuff builds up. Then it happens across multiple files and eventually it becomes really hard to figure out what you need to do.
Putting all of that stuff into a kanban board has been a huge win for me. Now I just drop all of that contextual info into a "research" list and I pick things off that list when I'm ready to really do them.
A made a video about this process a while back at https://youtu.be/HHOkcCqsipE?t=77. It shows an example of the before and the after.