Essential and accidental difficulties

Code Complete book explains this phenomenon in Chapter 5:

• Essential difficulty — it’s required things to to in order to have the user story done. Basically, essential things are described in acceptance criteria

Add code instead of changing it

As a project grows, we have to add the new functionality.

Let’s say we need to add a new validation rule for the old field. We’ve got 2 options:

1. find the existing validation for this rule and change it, which will affect…

The only thing which matters for your project

I think it’s a good test coverage.

I saw quite some projects: big and small, old and new, with and without test coverage.

Getter names for optional properties

Sometimes we have to deal with properties, which can be null

/**
 * @var string|null
 */
private $description;

It’s fine, IDE will generate a getter for us

public function…