I think that having corner/special cases is a CodeSmell.

That depends upon what those corner cases are. Sometimes it is impossible to avoid them because the real world does not behave the way we want it to. A common example would be leap years. You have to have corner cases there. In fact, there are a lot of corner cases in date handling due to how tricky it can be.

Also, hourly employees generally get time and a half if they work more than a set number of hours per week, but for some states/countries, they can also get time and a half if they work more than a set number hours per day. Those are exceptions to the rule and, as such, may get special treatment in the code.

Or how about removing data from a database? Many systems merely mark the data as "deleted" buy don't actually delete it so that it can be recovered. However, there may be legal reasons why the data must be deleted (for example, contractual agreements). This may come up as a "special case."

Many issues which may be a corner case can be developed in such a way that they're not a corner case (deleting database records, for example), but whether or not it's practical to do so depends upon the needs of a given application.

Cheers,
Ovid

New address of my CGI Course.

In reply to Re^6: Corner cases are not always "code smell" by Ovid
in thread Neither system testing nor user acceptance testing is the repeat of unit testing (OT) by pg

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