In this blog, we focus quite a bit on helping beginners and increasing their knowledge. The sentence “if the code works, don’t fix it” is sometimes taken as a rule by newbie developers. Though most of the times it works, i Personally think it is just an excuse from lazy developers.

In this post we’ll explain why and when should you actually fix the code.

Why Should You Fix it ?

There are a lot of benefits from fixing your code :

• Becomes more readable by other developers
• Improve the code quality
• Improve the code performance
• having testable code
• having extensible code

There are more opinions you can see , check here

When You Shouldn’t Fix The Code ?

Let’s get this out of the way and talk where this “rule” should be applied.

• you are new to a job and still haven’t figured out the architecture and the project structure but they order you to fix something that already works.

• if you think you’ll introduce problems to the existing code.
• do you understand that piece of code ?.

When Should You Fix it?

It Depends on many Factors :

• Is The Code Complex ? : When it comes to complex code it depends on your experience. can you clean up the code and make it simpler ? if yes then you should change the code. using either design patterns or clean code architecture.
• What Are The Gains ? : It always comes down to the results. Will the software gain performance ? does it help when adding new features ? does it improve readability or flexibility? scalability?
• How Long Will it take ? : Is the time that you are going to spend fixing this code equivalent to the amount of gain you get ?

How To Fix?

Following These Steps will help you fix the code :

• read the code until you understand it and comment the parts where it’s incomprehensible.
• Separate logic from state management.
• Break the logic down to pure functions that are easily testable.
• Add unit tests to ensure that you can change the code without breaking it