It’s summer time already, but every time I hear about cleaning revolution it reminds me of spring cleaning. And I can tell you I hate spring cleaning! I don’t get the whole idea of one time movements just because you didn’t care enough to keep your things tidy all year long!

The whole thing gets triggered now and again, because another developer gets annoyed with the amount of rubbish in the error log. Through years of not caring “suddenly” it’s hard to spot major issues through the flood of notices, warnings and stricts. So Tech Debt Tuesdays, unit test Thursdays and  clean up Fridays take place. Yada yada yada. Everybody get annoyed trying to fix it and after that all gets to normal. Why?! Have Starbucks Mondays and Orange Wednesdays instead – it’s fun! Do your day to day job and keep your code tidy. Every day. Every hour. Every minute. You spot something, you fix it. Simple. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s your code or not. Whether you are going to change it or not. The fact you have seen it is good enough to make you fix it.

I can only repeat after Uncle Bob Martin:

Cleaning code is just part of the normal everyday job of a programmer. It should not be something special on the schedule.

Teams should gradually fix code quality _outside_ the schedule. The improvements should be long term an on-going. Never schedule them!

Code quality issues should _never_ be in the backlog, or on the schedule. They should never get to that point.

Go team!