As a kid, I was never part of the boy-scouts or anything; but my family and I went camping a lot, and I went camping with my youth group on several occasions. I remember hearing my parents and the various youth leaders talking about we should always leave the camp site cleaner than we found it. I always thought this was annoying - why should I clean up someone else's mess? If I clean up my own mess, isn't that good enough?
Yesterday, while helping a coworker fix some bugs in an application that I wrote around a year ago, I was suggesting ways to improve various parts of the code; move this property to a parameter of that method, make this method private and only call it from here in the owning class, and items as simple as making an if-then statement easier to read.
After a few of these suggestions, he asked me if I always clean up the code that I'm working with, even if the bug is not directly related to the code that we are cleaning up. My answer was emphatically, "yes". If I'm reading code, trying to find a bug and I'm having a hard time understand what's going on with the code, then it becomes much more difficult to find the actual bug. Even if this code does not end up being part of the bug I was looking for, by cleaning up the code I am making it more likely that I will be able to understand what this code is doing the next time I have to look at it.
Here's my basic perspective that drives all of this: if you have a hard time reading the code and seeing what it is doing, chances are, you or someone you know will have to debug that code at some point. I don't want to debug hard to read code - that's annoying, at best. I want to debug code that is easy to read and easy to understand. And I certainly don't want to make any of my coworkers debug hard to read code. I try not to torture coworkers like that. So, if my motivation is to not debug hard to read code, then doesn't it make sense that I would want to clean up that ugly code? It makes sense to me...
What does this really come down to, then? Two things:
- Leave the code cleaner than when you arrived, by
- Micro-refactoring - make that one line of code easier to read
(By the way - there's no such thing as "micro-refactoring". Refactoring, by definition, is exactly what I described above. Stop trying to change the architecture and learn to change that one line of ugly code. By doing this, you'll find that the architecture does change, because you clean up more than you realize and change become natural.)