Before this even came up I was discussing with our java team about how they go about marking changes. Mostly they don't, they use source control to track changes. I didn't get into code review and using that system to assist in code review. Some of them even hate having to put comments at the top of the source to say what they did because they already put it into the source control system.
I understand your issues with mod-marks, in that they're not perfect, but in my experience they've been pretty trustworthy. I can't count the # of times I wanted to know why a specific line was changed a certain way and was able to use the ticket# on the line to find out. Another option would be to use the date changed (which is how I was thinking we'd do it with this new change). The main reason for keeping mod-marks in our team has been that we often will fix formatting - or convert code from fixed to free (which happens a lot these days b/c of the old D/P/H specs), but we don't see much value in mod-marking those changes. Maybe once we get an actual change management system (which we keep hoping to do, but keeps not happening).
For code review we comment out instead of deleting lines, but always delete them before implementing.
Kurt Anderson
Sr. Programmer/Analyst - Application Development, Service Delivery Platform
-----Original Message-----
From: RPG400-L [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Buck Calabro
Sent: Friday, September 18, 2015 4:44 PM
To: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Coding in Column 1
On 9/18/2015 3:24 PM, Kurt Anderson wrote:
I was curious what the community thinks about getting rid of the 'mod mark' concept (putting a ticket/request/whatever # in columns 1-5)?
The idea was worth trying, but in my experience there are some flaws:
Deleted lines - comment them specifically so we can put the ticket number on them?
Changed lines that have been changed again - do we keep a mod mark history or is the last one 'good enough'? If it is good enough, then what is the value of any previous mod marks?
Added lines - how do you tell the line has been added to the code and not changed?
Copied lines (like copying a block as a template for a new section of
code) - what happens if I forget (it happens!) to manually mod mark these lines properly?
All in all it means that I need to perform manual labour which the computer is perfectly capable of doing without the keypunch errors I make, in order to satisfy a tradition which at best can only come close to answering the question 'what lines were touched to implement this ticket?'
Far better is a real change management tool. I don't have one either, but I've started to rely on Git and I'm thinking I might be able to plug in a ticket system like Jira too, but in the interim, plain English comments seem to work out at least as well as the mod marks ever did.
--
--buck
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