How to avoid Spaghetti code with Augoor

In the software development world, while searching to make the complex simple, it’s common to hear about analogies that compare coding struggles with everyday things in life, such as pasta. In this article, we’ll be talking about Spaghetti code. If you’ve never heard of this term, don’t worry, we’ll deep dive into what it is, what may be causing it within your project, and most importantly: how Augoor can enable you to solve this issue for good.?

What you need to know about Spaghetti code

Unlike a regular and tasty pasta plate, Spaghetti code is unpleasant and not enticing at all for software engineers. As is known, having a piece of code running is not enough, it must be able to be maintained over time and accessible to other developers within an organization. So, what is Spaghetti code? It’s a pejorative IT jargon to refer to unstructured and difficult-to-maintain pieces of software, in which lines aren’t easy to digest.?

According to Harvard’s Coding Style Guide “lack of white space is referred to as ‘spaghetti code’ since it is difficult to ascertain where one command ends and the next begins.” This type of code is missing the indentation and extra lines that makes code readable. It has no defined shape and contains an avoidable amount of mental translation between reality and its representations.

The bad news is that Spaghetti code leads to a problem that consumes development teams' time and delays market releases. Sometimes it ends up in refactors, and other times in re-writing the whole codebase because nobody knows how to understand and maintain that entwined spaghetti bolognese.

Behind your project’s Spaghetti code

Although your team, or you as a developer, may be already following coding best practices, there are many reasons why your project might end up experiencing Spaghetti code in the blink of an eye:

• Lack of organization and testing: when you prioritize speed over quality in a rush to get a product to market, it can result in code that is poorly organized and complex to understand.? Also, if code isn't properly tested, it may contain issues that will make it difficult to maintain.?
• Devs adding and modifying a project over the course of time without a consistent style guide: code that grows and evolves without proper planning can become a tangled mess. At an enterprise level, when a project passes through different hands, its architecture isn't usually respected over time.
• Poor documentation: poorly documented codebases can be challenging to understand, even for the developer that created them. This can lead to confusion and mistakes when trying to maintain or modify code; and makes collaboration a struggle.?
• Unclear naming: programming is a language, therefore it should communicate what it’s aiming to represent with clarity. File names must be specific but cast a wide net of future extensions. When nets are too broad, names tend to become vague. If a dev needs to mentally map flows between objects, functions, the item’s name, and its representation, we’re looking at Spaghetti code.??

This unwanted “pasta” has severe consequences. For companies, it increases maintenance costs and delays development cycles while leading devs to frustration and a bad coding experience.?

How to deal with it for good: it’s all about the right tools?

When it comes to software development, it’s usually cheaper to prevent a problem than to solve it. And for this, using the right tools is key. With Augoor, an AI-powered Code Intelligence platform, dev teams can multiply the output of code they generate, thanks to helping companies deal with spaghetti code, among other common pain points.?

Augoor enables scalar and semantic search across multiple repositories with AI-generated layers of information for devs to easily find what they need and boost their knowledge, making it easier to have a consistent style guide throughout the project’s progress.?

Also, Augoor’s AI documents code automatically in a natural and comprehensive way, as a developer would, optimizing team productivity and keeping code healthy. Cleaner code helps teams keep their programming from becoming overly complicated and avoid spaghetti-like backends.

Each of these benefits are good on their own, but together they smarten up software development. Devs can now rely on a single Code Intelligence platform to untangle their Spaghetti code, but most importantly, to prevent it.

Are you ready to power up your team with Augoor? Learn more at augoor.ai | Twitter | YouTube