Bill Wake is a great teacher. He has blogged about his involvement with NASAGA , ( the North American Simulation and Gaming Association) and his teaching benefits from his continual search for the best way to convey a particular topic. In this excerpt from Refactoring Workbook, published by Addison-Wesley, Bill writes about "Measured Smells". These are easily identified places in your code that are crying out for improvement. You can recognize them by the following smells: comments, long method, large class, and long parameter list.