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Code quality

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We are going through a competitive software race with developers working against time and under tight budgets. But developers, who are the masterminds of a tech team responsible for introducing new features to the software, wrap up spending a huge amount of time per week by just reviewing codes. These facts state a specific point that ignores the basic building block of software, Code Quality. Having quality code is as important as having functional software.
Why is code quality important for developers?

Code quality is important for developers because badly written code may lead to security issues and technical debt. Technical debt means the idea that bugs and code deficits can occur over time to the point where the cost of new code changes becomes much greater. While making short-term sacrifices in code quality, it will become more difficult to deliver quality software later.

A lot of development teams use measures to ensure high code quality like pair programming, peer code reviews, functional testing, and more. These are manual ways to understand and improve quality issues, this means they don’t scale well and also fail to pick up on many quality defects.

However, one among the best ways to enhance code quality, is using an automated code checking tool which can scan the source code against a set of standard best practices to suggest potential areas for development. By performing code checking early in the development process, the cost of fixing bugs and security problems can drop crucially. This means that a code checker that integrates directly with an IDE can is a great way to decrease the friction for improving code quality.


Code quality helps in:
  • Increasing readability and ease of editing
  • Making software robust
  • Making program sustainable
  • Encourages easy transferability
  • Reducing technical debt

How to Improve Coding Quality
  • 1
    Prioritise Comments

    It is necessary to note that you must not comment on every single aspect of the code. While dealing with functions, classes, and possibly complicated lines write 2-3 lines at the top of the code, and add comments. This will help you convey a much clearer software development code with an entirely better presentation.

  • 2
    Naming Convention

    An appropriate naming convention in all your coding guarantees that everybody can understand the different aspects of the program. Controlling different parts like file structure and variable names can make the entire program much easier for all the related stakeholders of your project.

  • 3
    Test Coverage

    It is impossible to cover all the issues of errors and bugs in the code with proper code testing. Because the software and the various conditions it operates in change from now and then. Likewise, aiming on the units of the code that requires to be properly tested is the way to go. This would not only impact a good quality of code but also finds potential errors previously.

The importance of Code reviews

Code reviews are of central importance to ensure good code and offer a way to locate issues so that they can be fixed as simply as possible. They can also guarantee the consistency and dependability of the software you’re building. For organisations who have adopted a DevOps way of life, code reviews are par for the course and are already fixed in the process as early as possible. The faster you find errors, the easier, and cheaper they are to fix.

Over 80 percent of developers surveyed said satisfaction with code review processes gives them confidence in software releases’ overall quality. A code review makes the code bug-free, efficient, adheres to standards, and as a whole focuses to catch issues early before problems multiply.

Code reviews can be performed in a lot of ways from pair programming, manual reviews, mentoring and the use of shared documents for easy review. Despite that, all of these methods can be time-intensive, and code review tools offer a way to automate the process.

There’s also a lot of other tools available that help teams automate the code review process:

  • Code Climate
  • CodeGrip
  • Codacy
  • CodeScene
  • Reviewboard
  • SonarQube
  • Veracode
  • Smartbear
What is code refactoring?

Code refactoring is actually a “Technique used for restructuring an existing source code, improving its internal structure without changing its external behaviour”. It is the method of fluctuating a source code in a way that it does not change the external behaviour of the code yet enhances its internal structure. It is a process to clean the code that reduces the chances of bringing in bugs. Refactoring is a modification made to the internal structure of a software component to make it simpler to understand and more economical to modify, without changing the observable behaviour of that software component. Bad smells denote that there is an issue in the source code that has to refactor. There are various tools that are available to identify and remove this. It is a method that changes our code in a more maintainable and readable way by avoiding the issues from the code. Refactoring is utilised to enhance the quality of software by lowering the complexity.

Why unit testing is important

Unit testing has been known to play a key role in developing high quality software, and as a result it has been extensively used. Even so, data on the relationship between unit testing and aspects of software quality remain insufficient.

Unit testing has an important place in modern software development. It is known in a survey by Runeson that the main reason for using unit testing was external needs. The test suites could then function as a technical specification. The other main reason behind using unit tests was to proclaim the use of agile methods in the organisation. Many practitioners have expressed problems with not having measures to confirm the usefulness of unit testing. This hinders estimating a return on investment (ROI) in unit testing and encouraging developers to run via unit tests. Presently, unit testing is promoted in a lot of international standards like ISO 26262, which firmly recommend thorough unit testing in safety critical systems.

Conclusion

Having a good code quality is as crucial as writing the code. You can enhance the quality of code at any time and reap the benefits of coding standards at any development stage. Just ensure you hold hands with the right custom software development company to get to your desired business goals.