DevOps Articles

The Boy Scout Software Development Principle

by Boy scouts have an easily understood philosophy, which is that they should always leave their campsites in a better condition than the state which they found it in. Cleaning away one piece of garbage each, or something equivalent, creates a situation where a visit from a boy scout group, becomes a great experience for everybody else.

Every single time you create a pull request, the code you commit should "pick up one piece of garbage", by refactoring it somehow, making it more easily read, and/or performing better somehow.

If you do it, and you instruct your developers to also do it, after a while everybody will do it.

The code is more easily read, which makes it more easily maintained, and the method as a whole more easily fits into a single screen, without scrolling, making it a much more pleasant experience to go back to it 6 months down the road, to add another feature to it ...