As a programmer, you want to deliver high-quality software that meets the needs and expectations of your clients and users. But you also face deadlines, budget constraints, and changing requirements that demand speed and agility. How can you balance speed and maintainability when programming? Here are some tips and best practices to help you achieve both goals.
The programming language, framework, and tools you use can have a significant impact on your productivity and code quality. You want to choose tools that are suitable for the type of project, the domain, and the target platform. You also want to use tools that are well-documented, supported, and updated. Some tools may offer faster development, but at the cost of performance, security, or compatibility. Others may offer more features, but require more learning, configuration, or maintenance. You need to weigh the pros and cons of each tool and select the ones that fit your needs and preferences.
You don't balance. Maintainable system - system that is able to ship fast, one is coming from another. Most of the shortcuts are ephemeral, it may save 10 minutes of coding but will block development pretty soon for weeks. Writing dirty / unstructured code doesn't speed things up.
I'd start with maintainability, always first. As long as you design a software system using common patterns, good practices and spread/popular tools, you'll usually get good enough performance as a base to start with. And as you design around maintainability, you'll make the way through maintenance and improvement easier. From there you can start iterating over speed/performance and take this decision again on each iteration about how to implement it.
It depends on the situation. For example, an initial startup company where time/money is limited, speed takes priority. On a smaller scale, when you are unsure if a feature will be used by your users, speed again takes priority. For more stable features or companies, maintenance takes priority. Maintenance is basically an investment in speed for the future. Without maintenance, your programming speed will get slower and slower. Truthfully, the hardest part of maintenance is getting business to agree to have time do things like unit testing, proper architecture and working on tech debts.
Having right architecture and a good guideline covering key points for structuring & development are initial points for maintainability. Clean code is essential point delivered in implementation and should be reviewed together with commitment to guideline in pull requests. Thus, right architecture (#1), absorbed and applied guideline (#2) can increase development speed while putting forth maintainable software with clean code (#3).
To a limited extent perhaps. Popular tools are popular for a reason. Typically, the trade-off between velocity and quality does not change a lot between popular tools (with a few outliers). Also, tool selection only happens at the beginning of a project, whereas maintaining a balence between velocity and quality is mostly an ongoing effort. Instead, focus on quality testing first, as well as early UAT. Velocity will come from stable code and changes being made earlier from UAT.
Coding standards are guidelines and rules that help you write consistent, readable, and maintainable code. They cover aspects such as naming conventions, indentation, comments, formatting, and structure. By following coding standards, you can avoid common errors, reduce complexity, and improve readability. You can also make your code easier to debug, test, and refactor. Coding standards can be defined by your organization, your team, or your tool. You can also use existing standards from reputable sources, such as the ones recommended by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI).
It is important to follow the industry wide coding standards to make sure the code remains readable and maintainable over a period of time. For web development projects, the following tools are standardised: ESLint, Prettier, JSDocs. Other tools adoption varies due to size of the time, scale of the project and the tech culture in the organisation.
My team uses a wiki system that any of us can contribute to. We keep a standards document that generally captures the few places we differ from accepted norms defined by the organizations maintaining our languages of choice (MSFT standards for C# for example). Additionally, it's a good idea to document test coverage requirements and any areas of your application that are particularly sensitive to performance impacting changes. The latter point is especially helpful for junior developers that are putting hands on very large complex code base's that they may not fully understand yet. It's no fun explaining in a PR review why changing this message processor algorithm will cause a downstream process to run more slowly.
One thing the developer should instill within, writing clean code doesn't take much time in fact it reduces development time. At least following below practices - do not repeat yourself principal - code formatting and writing meaningful variables , functions name. - writing failure case first in functions and handling error cases - passing params as objects if it's more than 4 - implementing singleton classes when required - making use of a factory design pattern when required - defining function with only one responsibility - maintain file structure in such a way which differentiates services, states and views. When writing a test case increases delivery timeline, I would prefer creating tech-dept items to address later.
Code is ready more than it’s written. Keeping this in mind changed the game for me. Following coding standards will not only help others understand and utilise your code, but it will make the process easier when you have to review it.
In terms of maintainability and sustainability, adhering to coding standards is paramount. Consistent adherence to coding standards ensures that code remains readable, understandable, and maintainable over time. During project life cycles, team composition may change, with new members joining and others departing. In such cases, having established coding standards in place becomes crucial. These standards provide a common framework and set of guidelines that facilitate seamless collaboration among team members, regardless of changes in personnel. By following coding standards, teams can effectively manage complexity, reduce errors, and streamline development and maintenance processes
Version control is a system that tracks and manages the changes made to your code over time. It allows you to create, update, and revert versions of your code, as well as collaborate with other developers. Version control can help you speed up your development process by enabling you to work on multiple features or branches simultaneously, without affecting the main codebase. It can also help you maintain your code quality by allowing you to review, merge, and test your code before deploying it. Version control can also help you recover from mistakes, resolve conflicts, and document your code history.
Version control is one of those often overlooked holy grails. What I mean by this is, like testing, version control such as Git is a an incredibly significant part of ensuring that a software solution is functional. Version control allows multiple developers to contribute towards common repository goals by committing their code to branches (yes, like a tree) which may be merged together. By not utilizing a version control system, teams and entire companies may fall vulnerable to such disaster scenarios such as losing entire code bases, failure to roll back to a more stable deployment, team members working on un-synced code (more out of date code) and many others. Version Control Systems (VCS) are industry standard. Please utilize them.
Anything more complex than ”Hello world” needs version control. Version control tools are essential and simply put, they are the most Important code quality tools there are. most version control systems incorporate a workflow and execution of other quality tools like, team code review steps, automatic test execution and code quality scan and more. We needs it ??
Repos are cheap. Have a core library repository where maintainability is chosen over speed always. Create distinct product repos for various contexts/clients/environments (naming convention is important here). Within these dedicated source code repositories that are related but distinct from the core upstream, you can choose to compromise differently - speed over maintainability e.g. in a POC project. The blast radius and risk is managed and you can approach the best of both worlds. Submodules is one way to do this, but might not be preferred by the team - the core idea is that you seperate your complex codebase into a strict maintainable upstream repo(s) with more relaxed downstream repositories that assemble into distinct build artifacts.
I have also found that having a 10 year history of code review discussions (on GitHub) can be very useful for investigating WHY certain changes were made.
It's not viable to maintain software without using a version control system. This tool is a must to maintain and extend software by allowing us to have full control of each version and by allowing us to easily share the same code across different engineers. Tasks like merging multiple changes, adding punctual changes, and reverting changes are examples of the advantages of this tool. Picture the situation in which you're working on a file along with other 3 engineers, and you were the last to finish, so you need to merge your changes along with the other 3 ones. What are the chances of failure?! Please use a VCS!
Tests are pieces of code that check if your code works as expected and meets the requirements. Tests can help you verify your code functionality, performance, security, and usability. Tests can also help you detect and fix bugs, refactor your code, and prevent regressions. Tests can help you speed up your development process by automating the verification and validation of your code. They can also help you maintain your code quality by ensuring that your code meets the standards and specifications. Tests can be written at different levels, such as unit, integration, system, and acceptance tests.
I agree, but people often think that high test coverage is sufficient. It’s not about the number of tests, it’s about the quality of tests and how they, in turn, can raise the quality of your code.
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In support of benefits given, TDD is an interesting approach to try. Though it might be hard at first but it definitely forces you to make better design and maintainability choices. It doesn’t help with speed of publishing code but it exponentially reduces time spent on working with the same code later on. And I have not seen a system which didn’t have updates to codebase.
From my point, It is not so important how much your code is covered with tests, as your desire to write code that is easy to test. This is where we come to the importance of maintainable code. I definitely vote for it.
In some ways, tests are better than detailed low level requirements. A good test tells you if your code does what's expected (and when a change has an unexpected consequence). The hard part is balancing how much to test v test complexity -- though complex tests are often a sign of complex underlying system design.
Refactoring is the process of improving your code design and structure without changing its functionality. Refactoring can help you eliminate code smells, such as duplication, complexity, coupling, or inconsistency. Refactoring can also help you enhance your code readability, modularity, reusability, and extensibility. Refactoring can help you speed up your development process by reducing the technical debt and increasing the maintainability of your code. It can also help you maintain your code quality by adhering to the principles of good software design, such as SOLID.
Refactoring your code is much like writing papers for school. One might begin with a bare bones outline which is refactored to become a first rough draft. This first rough draft is refactored to become a second rough draft and eventually through the refactoring process, a minimum viable product is produced. Through many more refactorings, a final draft is produced and deployed to your professor. Like rewriting term papers for a school subject, refactoring code is a method of incrementally improving quality.
A refatora??o de código, combinada ao MVP (Minimum Viable Product - Produto Mínimo Viável), traz melhorias notáveis, agilizando o desenvolvimento e reduzindo complexidades para futuros aprimoramentos. Isso permite uma entrega ágil de funcionalidades essenciais. A considera??o da melhoria contínua assegura um código sustentável e de alta qualidade, simplificando a manuten??o a longo prazo e prolongando a vida útil do sistema.
One thing to remember is "refactor" means "functionally equivalent but changing the structure" If you are changing more than structure (often indicated by a need to change test expectations) then it's not a refactor. It's a change.
I liken technical debt to financial debt. Both extremes of “none” and “too much” are crippling. The balance is somewhere between the two (e.g. “don’t borrow beyond what you can afford”). I liken the need to refactor to having a mortgage. Most people can’t buy a house outright. Sometimes you pay a lot down, sometimes you borrow more to add an extension. Finding the right balance as software engineers is difficult, and relies on a lot of experienced “gut feel”. Imperfect is nearly always better than failing to deliver. Code which isn’t shipped, is just a financial cost to the organisation with no return on investment.
So, it might go like this; write the needed logic as straight as posible to get it to work as expected. Then take a step back and see if there are parts that are repeated, things that could be simpler etc., and make those changes. After various cicles of this process, you'll end up with a clean code that should be simple to understand and maintain.
Feedback is the input and opinion of others on your code and software. Feedback can help you improve your code quality, functionality, usability, and user satisfaction. Feedback can also help you speed up your development process by identifying and resolving issues, gaps, or errors in your code and software. Feedback can come from different sources, such as your peers, your clients, your users, or your tools. You can seek feedback by using methods such as code reviews, user testing, surveys, or metrics.
Seeking feedback is an incredibly important part of growing to be the best developer you can be. Everyone has their perspective and asking others for their perspective can reveal information previously unconsidered. There is no shame in requesting a review, critique or feedback of any sort. In fact, these acts of humility are a driving force in self-directed, autonomous learning. I am an expert in what I do however I do not know everything. If I do not know an answer to something, I will admit that I do not know and then request a bit of time to learn an answer to share. This is where a request for feedback comes in. Learning can be a group, team building activity. Requesting feedback is an integral part of this learning process.
Existem momentos durante o desenvolvimento do software que saber a opini?o de outros profissionais no seu código e engrandecedor, pois assim podemos evoluir como programadores e até como pessoas. Ent?o se vc tem uma equipe que faz code review ou se você tem a oportunidade de trabalhar com pareamento, aproveite muitos esses momentos e n?o leve as sugest?es como pessoais, pois garanto que no final de um período, seu código estará bem melhor e você estará ajudando outras pessoas a melhorar o código delas também. O conhecimento está disperso pela sociedade, alguém disse, ent?o temos que aceitar que n?o sabemos tudo e sempre podemos aprender com alguém, adoro os feedbacks, mesmo quando n?o estou nos dias bons para ouvi-los ????
Individualmente, precisamos aumentar nosso networking principalmente com bons devs que est?o aí fornecendo muito conhecimento e técnicas de forma gratuita. Assim é possível compartilharmos e termos opini?o com esses profissionais a respeito da forma que codamos. Em equipe, é importante fortalecermos e principalmente o líder de cada stack ser um facilitador para tornar a cultura de feedbacks algo natural e claro, que o dev n?o veja como crítica negativa.
Feedback is good when it is timely and relevant. three things that affect that are culture (does the team prioritize feedback?), the structure of the change (smaller and more local changes make it easier to get feedback) and context (are there other people on the team who have collaborated on design.)
In my experience feedback is a essential tool that most developers hate. No one likes someone else critiquing your work. It can make you feel inadequate, or angry, or dig up any of the other emotions we have an humans. This is normal for everyone. Feedback is a tool that helps not only you grow but also those whom you give feedback to. Feedback enables growth mind sets, organic growth of your code base, reduces complexity, enriches collaboration and helps reduces unhealthy conflict. This in turn seeds up development but also helps with the maintainability of your code base. Embrace feedback as often as you can, where ever you can.
The working approach might be to design interfaces top-down first, break the task down into coherent functional pieces, then implement those pieces bottom-up and keep the test coverage reasonable along the way. Refactor if necessary after tests pass. This way you have clear separation of contract (interfaces) and implementation, which should give testability and reusability "for free" and from the start, as well as ability for quick & safe refractoring with test coverage in place. If you want to reuse your code, avoid the "quick and dirty" approach with a global shared state/variables, this way the easy testing likely gets impossible very fast, thus making the code hard to reuse and then slowing further things down considerably.
A major thing that can help is to focus on separation of concerns. Make sure modules and components focus on one concern at a time, write small focused functions/methods, achieving Single Responsibility Principle. Abstract concrete implementations by interfaces (or equivalent constructs based on the language at hand). The more loosely coupled the system is, the more likely bad code will be isolated and contained to be refactored later. In addition, it will be easier to add missing unit tests before refactoring on demand.
Integrating micro breaks, as short as 2 seconds, is a useful strategy, regardless of your tools or experience level in software development. Become aware of tasks you are undertaking and what you are perceiving in this time. Then restart working with the renewed awareness. These respites encourage self-awareness amid the code cascade, enhancing mental acuity and laying the foundation for error-free coding. After completing a task, consider taking a longer break to stretch, adjust your posture, or, if time permits, explore some new tech. Beyond immediate benefits, micro breaks foster creativity, mitigate burnout risks. With these intentional pauses, create a blend of speed and precision, elevating your code to new heights.
Always choose maintainability over speed, and speed shall follow. If you are sacrificing maintainability to get things done quick, you are doing it wrong. The code base gets complex as it grows. So letting-in only the best is the key.
Desenvolva com pensamento de como gostaria encontrar a codifica??o de um projeto se você fosse o novo dev responsável. Observe e estude o que o mercado tem adotado para tornar mais simples a manuten??o, mesmo que sua empresa n?o cogite em adotar, hoje, amanh? será outra história.