Technical Debt, Code Smells, and Refactoring

New software projects start out clean and optimistic, but quickly grow in complexity and difficulty to maintain until the code is difficult to understand, brittle to change, and impossible to test.

If you’ve worked with code for any length of time, chances are you’ve come across code like this. In fact, if you’ve been in development for even a little bit of time, it’s likely you’ve written code you now regret.

It could be that the code is hard to read or understand. Maybe the code is inefficient or prone to errors. Perhaps the code was built under a certain set of business assumptions that later changed. Maybe the code simply no longer conforms to the standards you and your team have agreed to. Whatever the reason, bad code feels like it is practically everywhere in codebases of any significant size or age.

This code litters our software projects and reduces our development speed, causes us to...