How To Ensure Quality With Automation

As a startup working with a team that is thousands of miles away, there are many things that one needs to take care of – Timezone, communication, reporting, etc.

Code Quality is a similarly important factor in a successful offshore journey.

Ensuring that quality of code remains high helps avoid rework and mitigates product development risks.

Ensuring code quality is a problem that has several aspects connected to it such as attention to detail, right approach, and understanding of tasks. To be able to take care of these aspects is the ultimate win for team leaders and project owners. Managing code quality means making the team self-reliant and organized.

Let us see, what is code quality, how it is ensured with automation, and what are its best practices.

What Is Code Quality?

Code quality is a subjective matter and can be understood from various contexts. For different developers working in different ecosystems, the parameters of code quality could be different. A good or high-quality code, in general, is a clean code that stands up to most of the tests it is put forward to and certainly lasts long. A simple test of good code is if the developer himself and the team can understand the code after 3 months.

The main properties of a good quality code are:

• Clarity: The code should be easy to read and highly understandable, even to people who aren’t related to the code in any way.
• Easy Maintenance: The code should be modular, making it less complicated to make changes whenever needed.
• Documented: The code should be written to self-explain. Developers should make use of comments to explain complex functions.
• Consistency: The code formatting should be consistent and should follow the significant coding conventions.
• Well-Tested: The code should have followed rigorous testing to have no critical bugs. The lesser the bugs, the higher the quality of the code.
• Efficient: Code should be able to optimize the use of available resources to carry out its function ideally.

The whole team, i.e. the delivery manager, tester, and developer need to invest time to ensure quality in code because if left unattended, poorly written code can grow to a size where it cannot be fixed, it just has to be scraped off.

Code Quality Checklist

How To Manage Code Quality?

Ensuring quality is important because it affects the overall condition of the software project. It is the measure of safety, security, and reliability of the code. To improve the quality of your code, one must follow certain measures such as

1. Make Use Of The Applicable Coding Standards

It is highly recommended for everyone desiring to develop a high-quality code to use coding standards. Using a coding standard makes it more readable and ensures consistency. The use of coding standards makes the code less complex and easy to benchmark. Coding standards can be documented and shared with the whole team at the start of a project.

Few coding standards used by Mindbowser are

• Limited use of globals
• Naming conventions for files, packages, local and global variables, constants, and functions
• Proper and consistent Indentation
• Error return values and exception handling conventions
• Avoid using a coding style that is too difficult to understand
• Documentation to be part of the code
• Limiting the length of functions

2. Timely Analysis Of Code

The development team needs to analyze the code at pre-decided frequencies such as at a particular day in week, at every release, at every merge or at every sprint. It helps in saving time later when errors could add up creating a spiral of dependencies. Additionally, when developers know their code will be reviewed, there is a subconscious effort to improve to make the review go smooth.

Read the full blog post to know more about how to manage code quality and what is CI/CD and how to implement it.