Branches and Code Quality

A while back I posted about not reformatting code and the problems you incur when merging branches. After some thinking, reading and discussion, I'd like to partially recant that advice.

I still think that moving brackets around in the code is pretty much a waste of time compared to things you could tidy up which make code easier to understand.

But more and more I think that the cost of a merge made a little more difficult is repaid many times by improving the code quality.

Martin Fowler has quite a lot to say about branches.

But in general we read code a lot more often than we write it, so I'm more and more prepared to amortize the cost of fixing poor and mediocre code for the benefit of less confusion, less bugs, more tests.