While our work as software engineers is to focus on bringing products quickly to the market; 80% of our work still resides in maintenance or “the act of repair”. Everyone agrees! Bugs have their cost. Striving for technical excellence reduces this cost. Just like a clean shop floor reduces accidents, and well-organized shop tools increase productivity. By cleaning your code and designs, not only will you make it hard for bugs to hide but the maintenance becomes much easier.
While it is true for bug fixing, adding features can be very slow if the code is messy. Experience taught me that maintainable code is the key to success. If your codebase looks like an unorganized pile of blocks, it will be a challenge to add a new bloc. Remember the Tetris game? I was a huge fan at the age of 9. Today I play it daily in my codebase. There are a number of principles and techniques we can apply in our daily practices to make our code easier to maintain.
James O. Coplien wrote in its foreword of the book clean code:
“… the smallest bit of sloppy construction, or the door that does not close tightly or the slightly crooked tile on the floor, or even the messy desk, completely dispels the charm of the larger whole. That is what clean code is about.”
Clean code is one step into the journey of technical excellence. Automated Testing, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Pairing, and code reviews, just to mention a few of the practices. Today we see a number of books, blogs, conferences, boot camps, classes where the knowledge is transferred. Bourk Software Development is committed to providing you that knowledge at your place, in your code!