boy-scout-rule

The Boy Scout Rule guides making small, focused improvements whenever you touch code—removing dead code, fixing lint issues, renaming variables, and adding type annotations. Apply one minor improvement per edit, run tests to preserve behavior, then document the change in your commit message.

Small improvements include fixing lint violations, renaming poorly named variables, adding missing type annotations, extracting magic numbers into constants, removing unused imports, simplifying complex logic, and updating outdated comments. Each improvement should be narrow enough to review and test independently.

Run your full test and lint suites after each improvement to verify behavior is preserved. The Boy Scout Rule requires passing all tests before committing, ensuring cleanup changes don't introduce regressions or side effects.

Large rewrites risk introducing bugs and are harder to review. The Boy Scout Rule prioritizes small, maintainable enhancements that keep the codebase incrementally healthier. Save comprehensive refactors for dedicated tasks with explicit test coverage.

Record each Boy Scout improvement in your commit message to track why cleanup was applied. This creates a history of incremental quality gains and helps teammates understand the rationale behind minor changes during code review.