Keeping Code Clean During Rapid Development: Review and Refactoring Strategies

Recent intense project iterations forced many teammates to work on the same microservice, leading the author to often approve pull‑requests with only a quick glance, which caused a loss of understanding of the codebase and constant anxiety about potential production issues.

To regain control, the author now deliberately spends time reviewing each completed feature’s code, records any concerns, and discusses them with the original author to ensure consistent business‑logic comprehension.

The author observes diverse coding styles and common code smells, such as controllers that contain all logic without separate service or DAO layers, methods with excessive parameters, and unnecessary code (including remote calls) inside transactions.

These practices raise the question of whether such code truly possesses "technical content"; the author argues that before aiming for sophisticated solutions, the code must first be clean, readable, and maintainable.

Referencing the "boy‑scout rule" from *Clean Code*, the author advocates making the codebase cleaner than it was found—renaming variables, splitting long functions, removing duplication, and eliminating nested conditionals.

Continuous improvement is highlighted as a professional habit, and the author shares resources on coding style, standards, and refactoring, including a micro‑refactoring example that transforms a bulky implementation into three well‑defined classes, illustrated by the images below.

"The broken‑window effect in software development means that low‑quality code left unaddressed invites more low‑quality solutions, eventually degrading the system’s maintainability and extensibility."

The refactored design separates object assembly, amount calculation into an enum, and other responsibilities into distinct classes, aligning with object‑oriented principles.

"Each refactoring step is simple—moving a field between classes, extracting a method, or shifting code up or down the inheritance hierarchy. Yet, accumulated small changes can dramatically improve design quality." – Martin Fowler

Ultimately, the author stresses that readability outweighs elegance or flashy techniques in business code, and that maintaining a clean codebase is the foundation for any future technical advancement.