The Case Against TODO

This article has covered the use and abuse of TODO. In some cases, it is redundant; in others inadequate; in others misleading; and in yet others it could more usefully be replaced by code. TODO is sometimes a note written in some personal shorthand, which, like many such notes, is in danger of becoming meaningless to even its originator.

I have no major problem with any of these uses, though personally I avoid them. It's the times when TODO (or FIXME or HACK) gets roped in to defer the proper treatment of a defect which make it suspect.

In Overload 68, Alan Griffiths writes:

The worst thing that can be done on encountering a problem is to ignore it on the basis that "someone else" should deal with it. The next worst thing is to bury it in a write-only "issues list" in the hope that one day someone will deal with it. If everyone behaves like that then nobody deals with anything.

Griffiths is talking about problems in a wider sense, perhaps, than this article, but he expresses my frustration with TODO perfectly. A search through code for TODOs is all too likely to reveal a "write only issues list". Too often, FIXME silently marks a place where we know something is wrong, but we haven't bothered to do anything about it. Worst of all, HACK gets deployed when we know something is wrong and we fear we might have made it worse.