How many lines of code should a function/procedure/method have? [duplicate]

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It’s not about lines of code. As Steve Mcconnell and Bob Martin say (two pretty good references on coding best practices), a method should do one thing and only one thing. However many lines of code it takes to do that one thing is how many lines it should have. If that “one thing” can be broken into smaller things, each of those should have a method.

Good clues your method is doing more than one thing:

  • More than one level of indention in a method (indicates too many logic branches to only be doing one thing)
  • “Paragraph Breaks” – whitespace between logical groups of code indicate the method is doing more than one thing

Just to name a few. Bob Martin also says to keep it around 10. Personally I usually try to shoot for 10. If it starts getting close to 20, that’s a mental flag to pay closer attention to that method. But ultimately, lines of code are a bad metric for pretty much anything. It is only a helpful indicator that can potentially point to the real issue.

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