"To Clean-Code or Not To Clean-Code" A Survey among Practitioners

TL;DR

This survey explores developers' perceptions and practices regarding Clean Code principles, revealing general agreement on their benefits but also tendencies to write messy code for future refactoring.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into how practitioners perceive and apply Clean Code principles in real-world software development.

Findings

Developers agree with Clean Code principles and their benefits.

Many developers write messy code with the intention to refactor later.

Practitioners recognize the importance of Clean Code for collaboration.

Abstract

Context: Writing Clean Code understandable by other collaborators has become crucial to enhancing collaboration and productivity. However, very little is known regarding whether developers agree with Clean Code Principles and how they apply them in practice.\\ Objectives: In this work, we investigated how developers perceive Clean Code principles, whether they believe that helps reading, understanding, reusing, and modifying Clean Code, and how they deal with Clean Code in practice. Methods: We conducted a Systematic Literature Review in which we considered 771 research papers to collect Clean Code principles and a survey among 39 practitioners, some of them with more than 20 years of development experience.\\ Results: So far, the results show a shared agreement with Clean Code principles and its potential benefits. They also show that developers tend to write messy code to be refactored later.