Continuous Cleanup: A Sustainable Approach to Managing Technical Debt

Bridging the Gap Between Code Efficiency and Project Progression

The smart decision: It’s time for cleanup! Prompted and edited by the author.

Effective management of technical debt is not a one-time task, but a continuous practice that, when executed correctly, can lead to a balance between code maintenance and the sustained progression of a project, or is it?

It is surprising that, despite being considered such a beneficial practice, continuous cleanup is often relegated to the background until the accumulation of technical debt forces a major review. Perhaps this belief is mistaken, we are wrong, and there is a catch. We should reexamine this trend, and even our own belief about continuous cleanup being beneficial.

The previous article showed the cost of not cleaning the code, and waiting until the end to refactor, and its disastrous results.

How Much Does It Really Cost to Do a Major Code Refactor?

However, the alternative of cleaning the code little by little every day remained in doubt. The moment we compare doing a single refactor, once, with many small ones, but despite…