Poop: The Refactoring Method
I developed an quirky technique for dealing with the intermediate states of a refactoring. I call it the "poop" method (no biological metaphor implied). This method is far less controversial than one might suspect, but it is mildly unsettling. I find myself working in a legacy code base. Refactoring requires me to take several small steps, each of which leaves a sub-optimal intermediate state. I decide to mark the code with some kind of comment that will indicate that the work there is incomplete. It needs to be a word that doesn't normally appear in code, and which is clearly and obviously undesirable. If I put TODO, it will either get lost in the other TODOs left by well-intentioned people, or else will be stopped by a lint tool that takes such things seriously. Most obscenities would also be a little too likely to be duplicated by someone having a bad day. My marker comment should not be something so obscene that it will offend or embarrass myself or my reviewers...