Nithin Bekal About

The boy scout rule

06 Feb 2015

The boy scouts have a rule - “Always leave the campground cleaner than you found it.” Uncle Bob Martin proposed the programming equivalent of the rule:

Always check a module in cleaner than when you checked it out.

This piece of advice is especially relevant in cases where fixing a mess in one go is very difficult.

Some time ago, I was in a situation where we had to drastically change the functionality of the app just a few days before launch. We weren’t too comfortable with TDD, so we decided to give up on tests and just get the thing out the door first. We didn’t even bother with keeping existing tests green.

When we shipped the project, a huge chunk of the test suite was failing, and we couldn’t tell how many of them were because of actual bugs. Luckily there weren’t any serious bugs, but we found ourseleves maintaining a horribly broken test suite.

Fixing the entire mess at once seemed scary, so we started following the Boy Scout rule to clean things up gradually. This meant following two simple guidelines:

  • Always make sure all the tests pass for the part of the codebase you’re working on.
  • When you add new code, make sure the tests pass for all the existing methods it touches.

Within a month, we were down to a handful of failing tests. These were of the harder-to-fix variety, but suddenly the task started looking manageable. After wrestling with these tests for a couple of days, we finally got to 100% passing test suite.

We still didn’t have very good test coverage, but the codebase got more and more maintainable as time went on. We have continued following the rule and kept improving the tests for anything we touched.

No matter how much we try, codebases always get worse with time if we aren’t actively working against the rot. Following the Boy Scout Rule is a great way for teams to do this.

Hi, I’m Nithin! This is my blog about programming. Ruby is my programming language of choice and the topic of most of my articles here, but I occasionally also write about Elixir, and sometimes about the books I read. You can use the atom feed if you wish to subscribe to this blog or follow me on Mastodon.