Get the ball rolling, part 2 (of 4, most likely)

I hope you had some time to read the XP episode paper and ponder a little on what they managed to get in the end. As I've anticipated, I do I have a few issues with the results. It's not a matter of correctness: they pass all the tests. It's a matter of quality.
The design is questionable, and even the code is questionable. No big deal: after all, it's a little more than a toy example. It gets slightly worse when you consider all this stuff in perspective (at the end of the XP game, code is all you get; I'll get back to this later). Right now, here are the main flaws I see:

- overabundance of numerical literals.
This is programming 101: literals are bad (although they keep your code a few line shorter). Go over the code. You'll see numbers like 10 just about everywhere. Unfortunately, in bowling you got 10 pins and also 10 frames. You always have to read carefully to understand which is which. Now go back to the wikipedia page on bowling. See the mention of 5-pin bowling, 9-pin bowling, etc? Just go ahead and change the code to use 9 pins and 10 frames(9-pin bowling ain't that simple, but anyway). Guess what, none of the test cases will help, and it's not a one-line change as it ought to be. There is even a 21 in that code, being 10 * 2 + 1. I'll let you figure what that 10, 2, and 1 are :-).

- programming against an implementation, not against the problem
Some portion of the code are indeed quite good:

 public int scoreForFrame(int theFrame)
  {
    ball = 0;
    int score=0;
    for (int currentFrame = 0; 
         currentFrame < theFrame; 
         currentFrame++)
    {
      if (strike())
        score += 10 + nextTwoBalls();
      else if (spare())
        score += 10 + nextBall();
      else
        score += twoBallsInFrame();
    }
    return score;
  }

You can basically read it in plain english. Unfortunately, most of the rest is not of the same quality, for instance:

 public void add(int pins)
  {
    itsScorer.addThrow(pins);
    adjustCurrentFrame(pins);
  }
  private void adjustCurrentFrame(int pins)
  {
    if (firstThrowInFrame == true)
    {
      if (adjustFrameForStrike(pins) == false)
        firstThrowInFrame = false;
    }
    else
    {
      firstThrowInFrame=true;
      advanceFrame();
    }
  }
...
  private void advanceFrame()
  {
    itsCurrentFrame = Math.min(10, itsCurrentFrame + 1);
  }

"Adjust" a frame? Couldn't we get it right on the first place :-)? Even a Math.min call?? C'mon. There isn't any resemblance with the problem domain. It's just programming against the implementation, until things seems to work. Now, I've seen a lot of code like this over the years; it's the typical code people get after years of tweaking, except here it didn't take years, just hours.
Now, tweaking code till it works is already bad per se, but it's much worse when you consider that in XP, at the end of the game, the code is the design, and the test cases are the requirements. Again, everything is fine when the domain is trivial, largely known, well documented elsewhere (like in this case). But if we tackle a difficult new problem in an uncharted domain, and all we leave behind is code like that, I pity the souls that will join the team.

- Feature Envy: Game over Frame
According to Fowler, a method (or worse, a class) is exhibiting Feature Envy
when it "seems more interested in a class other than the one it actually is in". A variation of Feature Envy is when the other class does not even exist, but it is continually talked about in a method (or another class). Take Game. Excluding empty lines. Game is 45 lines long; if you exclude brace-only lines, it's 25 lines long. Of those, 16 contain the word "Frame". Is that suggesting you a missing abstraction?

- Feature Envy: Scorer over Ball
Just like above, Scorer is 57 lines long excluding empty lines (35 excluding also braces). Of those, 15 contain the word Ball (and 6, the word Frame). C'mon. We're talking about bad smells here, you agile guys are supposed to fix this stuff.

(note: the two previous issues may come from hindsight, as in my design, I do have a Frame and a Ball class).

- "Scorer"?
Good ol' Peter Coad once talked about the "er-er Principle": Challenge any class name that ends in "-er" (e.g. Manager or Controller). If it has no parts, change the name of the class to what each object is managing. If it has parts, put as much work in the parts that the parts know enough to do themselves.
That's OOP 101, because if you need a manager, it's because you got passive objects, and objects are about behaviour, not just data. You need a scorer because you haven't got the right classes.

Overall, this is not code you may want to maintain. Wanna give it a try? Ok, try to change to rules to, e.g., 3-6-9 bowling or low-ball bowling. Or make your own random rule, like "the 7th frame is only allowed one ball". See how easy it is. Hey, don't give me that YAGNI look :-), you are supposed to embrace change :-)).
It's worth repeating that in a real case, you'll be much worse off: you won't have a lenghty transcript of the session, telling you about how they come to put together that code. You'll have just the code; except that, in real-world projects, code will be 3 or 4 orders or magnitude bigger. You'll have to figure out everything else just from the code. If that's the average quality, well, good luck.

Of course, having only code to maintain means cheaper maintenance. Well, more exactly, it means that the mechanical act of maintenance (modifying stuff that needs to be changed) is cheaper. Of course, maintenance is not just about the mechanics: it is (mainly) about understanding the existing, understanding the new, understanding how to get from here to there.
Some redundancy (between wordy requirements, high-level design, and code) can help. Indeed, when I decided to design & implement my version of what above, I found it more convenient to read the wikipedia page, not to reverse engineer requirements from code. Of course, I also used the test cases they wrote to corroborate my understanding of the rules. Some redundancy can be helpful. Just ask your favorite aerospace engineer :-)).
This is why I always teach people to look for the bright and the dark side of everything, redundancy included (which of course, has well known shortcomings as well). That's why I don't like "extreme" approaches that pretend there is no downside in making "extreme" choices, only benefits.

So, on the bright side :-)), the code above is short (excluding blank lines and excluding test code, it totals 102 lines). Indeed, in a usenet post RCM reports that people who have "generated code" from the devilish overdesigned :-) UML diagram and added behavior got a whooping 400 lines.
Big deal. That was (in the authors' intention) a sketchy domain model, not a sensible design model. And code generation is usually a scam. That has nothing to do with diagrammatic reasoning (quite the opposite, I would say: it's diagrammatic nonreasoning: more on this next time).
Back to the bright side of the above, that code uses only 2 classes, which could be good if you don't like diagrams (which would help you understand the collaboration between multiple classes). Appalling enough, considering that the two authors together have something like 70 years programming experience, it looks like beginners' code. Which could be good in some environments. I'll get back to this another time.

Ok, enough bad cop for today. I'll show you my stuff in a few days (meanwhile, you can grind your teeth :-). I'll also describe my "process" and then draw some conclusions.