The Boy Scouts of America have a simple rule that we can apply to our profession: "Leave the campground cleaner than you found it". The boy-scout rule states that we should always leave the code cleaner than we found it.
When making changes to an existing codebase the code quality tends to degrade, accumulating technical debt. Following the boyscout rule, we should mind the quality with each commit. Technical debt is resisted by continuous refactoring, no matter how small.
With each commit make sure it does not degrade the codebase quality. Any time someone sees some code that isn't as clear as it should be, they should take the opportunity to fix it right there and then.
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