In-Depth: What Scientific Research Has To Say About Technical Debt And Code Smells

Why is code quality so often an issue? Why do software teams — despite their best initial intentions — often end up fighting a codebase that is hard to test, resistant to change, and prone to strange bugs?

We have many intuitions about this. But we’ve learned the hard way that my intuitions are often wrong. So in this episode, we explore insights from scientific studies that have investigated technical and code smells. We also share evidence-based recommendations on how to write better code. This episode is interesting both for developers and non-developers.

And yes, it turns out that several of our intuitions are indeed wrong :D

Read the transcript of this episode (it includes the reference)

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The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.