Software Craftsman Yule Calender: 2nd of December

"Do no harm"
(The hypocratic oath revisited)

The Boy Scout rule is to leave the camp site better than you found it. This goes for coding as well as camping.

Simply check in better code than you checked out. Not much, necessarily, just a little.
Don't create a mess.
Never buy into the self delusion that you can come back and clean it up at a later time.
Don't let the code rot.

All other things in our posession:

• The Architecture document.
• The Design Document.
• The Requirement specification.
• The Test description.
• The user guide.

All these things are mere derivatives of our true core; the code.

Where the code is a mess, everything is a mess.
Where the code is rotten, everything is rotten.