Tidy First?: A Personal Exercise in Empirical Software Design

Messy code is a nuisance. “Tidying” code, to make it more readable, requires breaking it up into manageable sections. In this practical guide, author Kent Beck, creator of Extreme Programming and pioneer of software patterns, suggests when and where you might apply tidyings to improve your code while keeping the overall structure of the system in mind. Instead of trying to master tidying all at once, this book lets you try out a few examples that make sense for your problem. If you have a big function containing many lines of code, you’ll learn how to logically divide it into smaller chunks. Along the way, you’ll learn the theory behind software coupling, cohesion, discounted cash flows, and optionality. This book helps

Why is this interesting for XMS

By Duncan Roosma: This book is a short, highly practical read, totaling around 100 pages. It’s designed to be approachable—even if you’re not a strong reader, you can easily finish it in an evening. One of the key strengths of this book is that it’s not necessary to read it cover-to-cover; you can skip around to the sections most relevant to you at any given time.

What sets Tidy First? apart is that it arms you with several valuable heuristics (rules of thumb) that you can immediately apply to your day-to-day work. These principles will help you better manage and make changes to existing codebases, making your development process smoother and more effective.