Bugs and Churn

If you’re spending a lot of time swatting bugs, remove smells in the methods or classes of the buggy code. You’ll make it less likely that a bug will be reintroduced.

After you commit a bug fix to a feature branch, find out if the code you changed to fix the bug is in files that change often. If the buggy code does change often, find smells and eliminate them. Separate the parts that change often from the parts that don’t.

Conversely, avoid refactoring areas with low churn. Refactoring changes code and with each change, you risk introducing new bugs. If a file hasn’t changed in six months, leave it alone. It may not be pretty, but you’ll spend more time looking at it when you break it by trying to fix something that wasn’t broken.