What do you do if you want to improve code quality in software development?

Standards depend on the team you're on and they should be adopted to your needs. If you are on a new team, ask whether they have standards. If not, propose some established ones (e.g. DRY, KISS, PEP-8, etc.) and modify them to meet your needs. Always check if these standards are followed but also whether they still make sense for your project.

To improve code quality in software development, teams should focus on implementing coding standards and best practices, such as proper indentation, commenting, and naming conventions. Regular code reviews by peers or using automated tools can help identify issues early and enforce adherence to standards. Additionally, investing in continuous integration and automated testing can catch bugs and ensure consistent quality throughout the development process.

Adopting coding standards enhances code quality by providing guidelines for consistency and readability. Consistent conventions, like clear variable naming and code formatting, ease readability and contribute to a uniform code style. Adhering to these standards streamlines collaboration and reduces the learning curve for new team members, ultimately improving maintainability across the application.

Crafting tests is fundamental for upholding top-notch code quality. Automated tests, including unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, act as a safety mechanism, identifying bugs pre-production. Tests ensure code functions as expected and provide assurance when implementing changes, preventing unintended breakages. This approach fosters the creation of testable code, often leading to well-designed systems.

-Mark the beginning and end of control structures using indentation, specify the code between them. -Writing only a few lines -Avoiding lengthy functions , A experienced developer will agree that a single function should handle a single task. -Implement accurate naming conventions With short lines. - (don’t repeat yourself). You should not use the same code in the same script by automating repetitive tasks. -Include capital letters in SQL special words and functions to distinguish them from column names and tables. -Avoid deep nesting -Use camel cases for pojos -Avoid using single identifier for different purposes -Implement Exception handling

-Unit tests are tests that you can run against the individual units of your application. -This typically ends up being tested against the methods within your modules and classes. -If you find that you have a unit test that calls several functions, see if there's a way to break it up into a collection of simple tests. -When a simple test fails, it's easy to find the problem and correct it.

"Write Tests" refers to the practice of creating automated tests for your codebase. These tests verify that your code behaves as expected and continues to do so as you make changes. Writing tests helps improve code quality by catching bugs early, ensuring that new changes don't break existing functionality, and documenting how your code should behave. This practice is often associated with Test-Driven Development (TDD), where you write tests before writing the actual code. By writing tests, you can increase confidence in your code, make it more maintainable, and reduce the likelihood of introducing regressions.

Write unit tests to verify the functionality of individual code units. This helps catch bugs early in the development cycle and ensures code behaves as expected during modifications. Use some tools to check test coverage across the whole project or like git hub does for commits to be mergeable coverage unit test should satsisfy 100%

Make sure the app has both testing methods - E2E Testing : Which is basically a simulation of how the user would use the app. It also helps making sure bugs are not reproducible. - Unit Testing: I would suggest to use it for function and logic mostly rather than UI. Both testing should be connected to a pipeline when released it should run this way you have a continuous development/testing cycle

Always make sure to write test for the most important scenarios. Realistically, you would only be able to write unit test for some scenarios so you need to make sure that the most critical ones are covered. Use tools to continuously monitor code coverage to make sure the tests are being updated as new code is introduced (sonarqube springs to mind)

Code refactoring is the process of improving the internal structure, readability, and maintainability of a software codebase without altering its external behavior or functionality. ??Red-Green-Refactor : first of all failing the test cases for the required functionality .Write the code to pass necessary test .Improve the code while keeping the test green without breaking functionality. ?? Refactoring by abstraction: A technique where you identify common functionality shared by multiple classes or methods and extract it into a abstract class or interface. This process reduces code duplication, promotes reusability, and easier to manage and maintain the shared functionality. ??Composing :A technique break down large classes into smaller.

Regular refactoring is crucial for improving code quality: 1. Simplify Complexity: Make code easier to understand and maintain. 2. Reduce Technical Debt: Address potential areas of improvement and inefficiencies. 3. Enhance Readability: Improve collaboration and onboarding. 4. Improve Performance: Optimize algorithms and code execution. 5. Ensure Consistency: Maintain naming conventions and styles. 6. Increase Testability: Facilitate effective testing strategies. 7. Promote Scalability: Prepare codebase for future growth. 8. Boost Maintainability: Facilitate adding new features and fixing bugs.

Refactoring code has the chance to introduce bugs and therefore should not be done on a whim. Refactoring code when you are in a module introducing a new feature or when you are in a module fixing a bug can help improve the quality and maintainability of a code base. However, refactoring a module that you are not actively fixing or adding can introduce more bugs as well as just taking developer time away from other tasks.

"Refactor Regularly" is a key principle in improving code quality in software development. It involves continuously restructuring existing code without changing its external behavior to make it easier to understand and maintain. By regularly refactoring, developers can eliminate duplication, improve readability, and enhance the overall design of the codebase. This practice helps in reducing technical debt, which is the accumulated cost of postponing necessary work on the code. Regular refactoring also makes it easier to add new features, fix bugs, and adapt the code to changing requirements.

Refactoring should be decided as a group, everyone needs to know what they are refactoring towards. In the adopt standards section I mention the utility of group code reviews to establish standards. Those standards should be what refactoring is about. Additionally, refactoring should aim to remove dependencies from specific libraries, and build tools. These are things that are code adjacent but many times deeply affect how we build and deploy code. It should be a goal for refactoring to make the release process and tool upgrade process easy, no one likes replacing deprecated or discontinued libraries, that's why you should be very strict on what dependencies you bring in.

Using tools to enforce and assist with coding standards is one of those things you need to figure out once and it will give you a lifelong benefit. Your developers should not need to worry about trivial matters like how usings are organized, how whitespace is formatted, member ordering, etc. Ideally, these things should be formatted on save or as a pre-commit hook. There are plenty of IDE features and plugins that can do this. Seeing code changes in a pull request due to different auto-formatting settings between developers is just annoying and unnecessary. These settings should be stored in the project itself. Besides formatting, I believe in a strict set of rules to ensure consistency and uniformity throughout the lifespan of a project.

Low code quality comes under if we have syntax error and logical errors in code. The advantage of static analysis is that it can happen quickly, because it doesn’t require the application to be running. It typically integrate with your CI/CD tools, like GitLab, Jenkins. Code quality that used so far : sonarqube, Veracode -SonarQube is that it checks through your code as you write. It also has a quality gate which blocks any code that doesn’t reach a certain quality from going into production. -Veracode is to improve your application security and find holes in your software. It’s a very thorough tool that will definitely improve your code, but the scans can take quite a bit of time.

Start with the absolute basics in regards to tools and slowly work your way forward. This way, you will only start using what you really need and the chance of being overwhelmed by an abudance of tools is less. Absolutly necessary in my opinion are: - IDE: A good IDE usually includes a multitude of tools that can help you in your everyday programming tasks, such as syntax checking, debugging, etc. - Version control: Even if you are working alone, having version control is a great idea, especially if you want to try out new stuff without having a bunch of local files or you want to return to a prior state of code.

Use Static Code Analysis Tools: Leverage linters and static code analyzers to identify potential errors, coding standard violations, and areas for improvement. Enforce it as a precommit validation with compatible versioning systems.

Add integration with Sync or sonar cloud They are helpful as they suggest multiple things - Update for packages - Warning for packages when venerable - Warning on code or even error when code is not compliant . - Suggestion on how to better write code - Deprecation warning - Code duplicate warnings

Code Reviews: Regularly review code with colleagues. Feedback helps catch errors and improves overall quality. Pair Programming: Collaborate with another developer to write better code together.

Improvement comes from feedback. So once you are done working on a project, make sure that your peers and seniors have a look at your code and review it. Overtime, receiving this feedback can help you improve your skills greatly.

PRs provide a structured feedback loop. Ideally you’ll have two other engineers read your code and give specific feedback on how to improve it. This makes quality a team effort. On larger teams, PRs are usually a given. On small teams, the culture of reviewing code may not be well-established yet. It’s a fundamental part of software development and will improve the quality of the entire codebase.

Incorporate code reviews into your development process. This allows other developers to provide feedback and identify areas for improvement, leading to higher quality code.

the most important thing & this what i do with my team at work. I conduct a daily PR meeting for 15 min to answer question and make sure the team understand my code and why i did it . Same goes for them as I bring up these question to them. This is very important it helps you & other grow your coding skills

For internal documentation, commenting code is great, explaining why a certain approach was taken is also great. Basically add context to the code, something an LLM can't do. Most importantly document your standards, naming conventions, package structure, patterns and architectures, where the entry points of your code is; things that don't change on a day to day. For public documentation, make sure its thorough, make sure you give use-cases on how and why people should use your library. Keep it up to date, it should be part of your sprints to make sure that you didn't change something and made public documentation obsolete. Explain the order of things, what happens first, what next. Give code examples and demo applications.

Be careful here. Comments can frequently become out of date in code. Developers tend to fix bugs and refactor, but don't tend to read all the comments in a module to see if their bug fix or refactoring will require comments to be updated. The best internal documentation for developers is self-documenting code -- i.e. using clear descriptive names. Comments ideally will not be needed to answer how something works, just occasionally why certain decisions were made. There are exceptions to the above rule, the most common one being 'doc comments' -- comments used by tools to generate end user documentation for your product. For these exceptions, a team must develop a process to review the comments and documentation after work is complete.

Ideally the code and the tests should be most of your documentation. This was it is living and breathing. There are situations where a good README is more than beneficial (such as when setting up things that couldn't be automated). Make it part of your daily process to ensure that every new release includes updated docs when applicable.

For documentation, always consider this question first: who is the audience of the documentation? What is their prior knowledge and how are they supposed to work with the software? Documenting coding logic is different from documenting architecture or describing the UI. Before starting the documentation, think of who will use it and what for.

Before jumping into coding, it's fundamental to establish a robust architecture, considering methodologies like UML to ensure clarity and structure. Embracing the coding standards and rules of the company right from the beginning can significantly streamline the development journey. Dedicating time initially to understand these standards not only speeds up the process but ensures consistency across the team. Moreover, testing should pivot on predefined specifications rather than the evolving code, aligning tests with the system's intended functionalities from the outset. This approach underpins the development with a strong foundation, facilitating a more efficient and quality-driven progress.