Project Hygiene

Overview

• “Eat your veggies!”
• “Exercise multiple times a week!”
• “Brush your teeth and floss daily!”

Such are the exhortations that every child has heard (many times!) and grown to loathe. However, these are not practices designed solely to make one suffer: They are encouragements to help one develop and maintain good hygiene. Dictionary.com defines hygiene as “A condition or practice conducive to the preservation of health, as cleanliness.” As in, “If you do these things consistently, you’ll reduce the chance of bad things happening to your health in the future.“ However much having to keep brushing teeth daily is a pain, having to get the dentist to pull said teeth due to a neglect of this care is going to be much more painful!

This is a concept that can be easily applied to software engineering as well. Software projects have their own maintenance aspects outside of the main code development tasks: documentation, dependency management, deployment, and so on. Supporting these aspects might not be the most exciting or intellectually-stimulating work, but just like human hygiene, such is the nature of supporting a project’s hygiene: a lack of doing so could cause major pain for the developer in the future. Thus, when developing the practices and activities for a software development team, try making it a practice to develop a plan for maintaining the project’s hygiene via regularly scheduled activities that can be incorporated into the project’s development plan.