Despite its negative repercussions, incurring technical debt is often inevitable. In those cases, you must ensure that the decision is an informed and conscious one, and remember to repay the debt as soon as possible. So how do we actually pay back the debt? We do this through refactoring—or making our code cleaner without changing the existing behavior.
Whilst there are no formal definitions on what clean means, here are some signs of clean code:
- Well-structured: Code should consist of modules, separated by domains
- Well-documented: For example, include unit tests, inline comments, automatically generated documentation, and README files
- Succinct: Be concise, but not to the point of obfuscation ...
