How to Keep Your Code Clean When the Team Is Overwhelmed: A Practical Guide

Recent project iterations have become so dense that many teammates work on the same micro‑service, and our mandatory code‑review process often turns into a quick glance before approving.

This rushed approach creates a gap between design and implementation, making it hard to locate code, understand changes, and maintain control over the service, leading to constant anxiety about potential production issues.

To address this, I now dedicate time to thoroughly review each feature after it is submitted, record any problems, and discuss them with the author, which has helped me regain ownership of the business logic.

During these reviews I discovered many code‑smells: all logic packed into a single controller, excessive method parameters, unnecessary code inside transactions, and other inconsistencies that make the code hard to extend.

Although the code works, it lacks “technical depth.” Improving readability and structure is a prerequisite for writing higher‑value code.

Inspired by the “boy‑scout rule” from *Clean Code*—"Leave the camp cleaner than you found it"—I start with small changes such as renaming variables, extracting short functions, and removing duplicate snippets, which gradually improve the code base.

Continuous, incremental refactoring becomes a professional habit that keeps the project from degrading over time.

I also share resources on coding standards and refactoring with the team, including an article titled “Let Code Become Elegant: A Micro‑Refactoring Practice” (https://juejin.cn/post/7257144279049912376) that demonstrates a full refactoring example.

The original, bulky code is shown in the first image, and after refactoring it is split into three dedicated classes, each handling a single responsibility, as illustrated by the following images:

Software‑development “broken‑window effect”: low‑quality code left unfixed invites more low‑quality solutions, eventually making the system hard to maintain and evolve.

Martin Fowler on refactoring: each step is simple—move a field, extract a method, or shift code in the inheritance hierarchy—but accumulated small changes dramatically improve design quality.

The key takeaway is that readability should outrank cleverness; business code must be easy to understand, and only then can we safely add technical depth.