Small Daily Refactors Prevent Big Headaches: How Regular Cleanups Save Your Team from Code Spaghetti, Tech Debt, and Customer Frustration

Brian Anderson

Community Picks is a section on daily.dev where our community members share the most interesting and valuable content they've discovered online. From insightful articles to handy tools, every post is a gem curated by our dedicated coomunity. To contribute to Community Picks, you need to have at least 250 reputation points, ensuring that only active and trusted members can share their finds.

Community Picks

Refactoring daily can save development teams from technical debt and codebase issues. By spending just 20 minutes each day on refactoring, developers can simplify code, remove unused code, and improve overall code quality. Regular refactoring helps prevent bigger problems, makes maintenance easier, and fosters a healthier codebase. It's a long-term investment that benefits the entire team.

If You’re Not Refactoring Every Day, You’re Making a Mistake

I like the idea of making it a “housekeeping” habit. Incremental maintenance is way more sustainable than the big spring clean approach.

FYI I am the author of the post. Thanks for sharing and reading!

Good article :)
I like the idea that even a small amount it’s a good path to better quality. I do think though that sometimes refactoring implies changes or God forbid, bug. It can depends about the languages, the legacy code, the technical debt etc.
Even with test you can have a bad moment with that.
I think refactoring has to be learn as it is a very important skill to have. The books you give are one a most important one to read as a developer imo.
Your idea is kind of the scout rule in a way 👍

It looks like I’m working on a Garbo lol! It hasn’t failed yet but it also doesn’t have any, yes ANY AT ALL, tests. Lots of “any” by the way for those familiar with typescript. It has several components and basically no big rules to follow nor clear patterns. Are the components reusable in a way that makes some sense? Heck no. The best part? I’m upgrading it to version 6 to version 18. Is there a best part? Hell yeah: I’m doing it alone.

<a href="https://app.daily.dev/mirco92" data-mention-id="k3nIoid2OMvFZegnbCIlK" data-mention-username="mirco92">@mirco92</a> do you have any recommendation how to tackle a huge file? My approach is only to tackle the code i’m touching and leave the rest as is, so i don’t break anything i’m not testing and don’t create side effects i’m not aware.
Or should i be much more brave and tackle everything in the file and hope for the best? And by refactoring i mean only small refactorings in the big file which are obvious things the IDE like sonar analysis points me.