Code is clean if it can be understood easily – by everyone on the team.
With understandability comes readability, changeability, extensibility and maintainability. All the things needed to keep a project going over a long time without accumulating up a large amount of technical debt. Writing clean code from the start in a project is an investment in keeping the cost of change as constant as possible throughout the lifecycle of a software product.
Therefore, the initial cost of change is a bit higher when writing clean code (grey line) than quick and dirty programming (black line), but is paid back quite soon. Especially if you keep in mind that most of the cost has to be paid during maintenance of the software. Unclean code results in technical debt that increases over time if not refactored into clean code. There are other reasons leading to Technical Debt such as bad processes and lack of documentation, but unclean code is a major driver. As a result, your ability to respond to changes is reduced (red line).
Source: Robert C. Martin
Eugene Long
Technical Director
Think Tank Software Solutions
