Clean Code in JavaScript

Minimally invasive surgery

When changes are needed in an area of the code base that is old or unfamiliar, it can be useful to imagine that you are performing a kind of minimally invasive surgery. The aim in doing this is to maximize the positive effect of a change while minimizing the footprint of the change itself, ensuring not to damage or have too much impact on other parts of the code base. The hope with doing this is that we will be able to produce the necessary changes (upsides) without exposing ourselves too much to the possibility of breakages or bugs (downsides). This is also useful when we aren't sure whether the change is entirely necessary, so we want to only expend minimal effort on it initially.

Let's imagine that we have inherited ...