Planning, Decay, and Rescue vs Continuous Cleanup

Or why delaying early cleanup can devastate your budget beyond belief, and how to learn to love clean code.

Prompted by the author.

This article serves as the capstone to our series on long-term software development strategies, and aims to provide a final verdict.

This article is the culmination of a series where we’ve discussed the two major long-term software development strategies and how they impact development. We’ve explored the real cost of a big refactor, the expense of making small refactors, and now the time has come to pit them against each other and offer a final verdict.

Failure is a choice

The series began by discussing the U-Shaped Curve, a graph that illustrates the life of a product. Both the beginning and the end of a product’s life are often riddled with numerous defects. However, there is a maturity phase in between with relatively few problems, which is generally considered the product’s useful life.

The U-Shaped Curve…