Repaying technical debt through refactoring

Despite its negative repercussions, incurring technical debt is often inevitable. In those cases, you must ensure that the decision is an informed and conscious one, and remember to repay the debt as soon as possible. So how do we actually pay back the debt? We do this through refactoring—or making our code cleaner without changing the existing behavior.

Whilst there are no formal definitions on what clean means, here are some signs of clean code:

• Well-structured: Code should consist of modules, separated by domains
• Well-documented: For example, include unit tests, inline comments, automatically generated documentation, and README files
• Succinct: Be concise, but not to the point of obfuscation
• Well-formatted and readable: Other developers must be able to review and work on the same code base, so it should be easy to understand and not deviate too far from well-established conventions

As you gain more experience, you'll be able to detect code that deviates from these signs. In programming, we call these deviations code smells. Code smells are weaknesses within the code that violate well-established design principles, paradigms, and patterns. While they are not bugs themselves, they may slow down development and make the code base more prone to errors later.

Therefore, refactoring is simply a process that moves the current code base from having a lot of code smells to one that is cleaner. As we have mentioned before, there is more than one way to achieve the same results, and developers need to be creative and figure out the best solutions to problems that arise.

The important point here is that developers should be given time to refactor; in other words, refactoring should be the core part of a development process, and be included in the time estimates that the developers provide.