QQQ

In his talk at Quakecon this year, legendary programmer John Carmack (Keen, Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Rage) talked about code quality, and how even the very best programmers make lots of mistakes. So he says that every programmer should think about ways and methods that make mistakes happen less. This is something that I totally agree with, and this kind of thinking is the basis of the coding standard and methodology that we use at Ronimo Games.

One of the nicer things that have crept into our coding standard over the years is a tiny little trick that keeps a lot of issues from happening. It is pretty obvious, but I know a lot of programmers who don't do something like this, so I figured it would be useful to mention this one today. :)

Often when you are programming something, you quickly make some changes somewhere else to test one specific situation. For example, maybe you are testing the graphics of a weapon against a specific enemy. If that enemy dies all the time, you need to find another one to test on, so a quick change could be to decrease the damage of that weapon against that specific enemy by 90%. Now the enemy stays around a lot longer and you can test more efficiently.

However, once you are done working on that weapon, it is really easy to forget to remove your little hack. Later someone else spends hours searching through code why that enemy dies so slowly. Only to discover that forgotten hack of yours.

Many coders would say now that this is sloppy programming and you should just be a better programmer and remember these things. However, while programming, there are so many things to consider that it is easy to forget one once in a while, no matter how good you are. It is better to design your working method around the idea that you do make mistakes, then to simply say you should be a better programmer.

Now since these little hacks are a great help when programming, everyone I know uses them a lot. So I came up with a really simple trick to keep track of them. Whenever you do a little hack like that, you add a comment with the text "QQQ". So like this:

if (enemy->getName() == "UrQuan") damage *= 0.1f; //QQQ

All coders at Ronimo do this ('voluntarily'). Before we commit our newly written code to the source server, we search for QQQ to see whether we forgot anything. That gives us a list of all the temporary hacks that are still in there. And because we all use QQQ, and not something different for each programmer, we can quickly find QQQs that someone else forgot to remove.

Since QQQ is basically just a marker to remember something, I also use it when I realise I need to remember to rework or check something later on.

So why the letters "QQQ"? This specific term has the benefit that it never occurs in any normal sentence, and is short enough to quickly put in while working. I actually stole it from my brother and sister, who are both researchers and put it in their texts when they need to fill something in later.