Best Coding Practices & Benefits

Consider a situation- Client wants you to deliver a software application with best features and expects a quality product within the agreed time, and you too are committed to deliver the product as per client's expectations. Everything is going well and smooth and you raise a toast to successful launch.

Fast forward an year, comes the problem- the application starts to perform slow as the load increases over time. Client comes to you with a HIGH PRIORTY Incident raised in the service desk, while you diligently assign a new developer to the incident, you get to know that the new developer is having hard time understanding the code because of the following issues in the existing code:

1. Inconsistent code writing
2. Missing comments
3. Unstructured Release notes
4. Meaningless variables

Above issues may look simple problems but it takes a great deal of time just to understand the code, working on the real bug is a far sight in action plan.

Hence its very important to provision a standard coding process in the Software Development Team, this will not only streamline the Development Team but also accelerate efficiency by understanding the code in lesser time.

Below are some of the essential coding practices followed by Software Developers in MAST Consulting Group

Write Readable Code - Code should be written such that other developer could also understand the code written by you and this could be achieved by:

1. Write as few line of code as possible - don't make code complex unnecessarily.Make a practice to use indentation and spacing between code structure.Differentiate SQL keywords from rest of the table and column names by writing SQL special words in CAPITAL
2. Limit deep nesting- It gets difficult to understand too many deep nesting in the code
3. Descriptive Naming Convention- Use appropriate meaningful names for Variable, Function, Class to help understand other developers the significance of the piece of code
4. Add comments- write understandable relevant details about the program in form of comments

Follow consistent coding pattern- Follow the same code style as followed in the company, do not change code structure. This will be easy to maintain and help in collaboration.

Proper Error Handling- Its very important to handle errors in order to keep the execution process smooth and also identify errors to fix, below techniques are commonly used to handle errors:

Try- Catch

Usage of real time log analysis tools

Add logs for proper debugging

Documentation- This is only of the widely missed activities in the software development process which later on proves to be the biggest mistake. Good documentation helps track the project setup and during the time of system crash/failure its the best go to measures. Keep updating the document version wise. A proper plan could be derived from documentation.

Regular back up- By now even a fresher would have understood the importance of backing up the code daily, to avoid any code lose owing to system crash, power outage etc etc

Commitment towards commit messages - When there are multiple developers working on the same project, each developer must push the code with proper commit messages so that other developers easily understand the significance of every program and all developers are in sync regarding project development status

DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)- Its best recommended to automate that piece of code that require to be repeated multiple times in the script. Don't waste your productivity and efforts in redoing the same activity, If needed be, don't hesitate from using third party libraries to implement the feature by adding unnecessary code.

Unit Testing- Before handing over the code for QA and after merging the code to Master Branch, developer must perform Unit Test and attach Unit Test Confirmation with the same. This not only boasts confidence in the developers but also saves a lot of time by ensuring that the QA receives requirement that's up and working so that it could be further tested with constructive test scenarios.

With above coding standards, we at MAST Consulting Group have come a long way in delivering excellent quality software to our reputed client, some of such benefits are enlisted as follows :

High Performing Products- we could guarantee better quality of the product if the entire software development Team follows standard coding practice as there will less chances of conflicts in understanding the requirements versus implementation of the same.

Smooth and Efficient Development- When the team gets aligned and agrees on the consistent code structure, it gets smoother to execute the collaborative code.

Easy Transition - Software are ever changing and upgrading, almost every quarter client wants to add more features to there existing product, In such cases if we follow consistent coding behavior and we have proper documentation in place then it will be easier to follow the next steps as half battle is already won and remaining job is to understand new requirements.

Get in touch with MAST Consulting Group to help you write your successful software journey