Roadmap to Improve Code Quality

In this series, I will highlight some areas where you can improve the quality of your code during the development process. In this first article, I explain why code quality is paramount. Then I will briefly introduce you to some ideas that will help you improve the quality of your code. I will provide more details on these points in future articles. Some concepts will be illustrated with examples in Java and Python. I will begin this journey with you by introducing the SOLID principles in the next article. They are some of the concepts that will help you improve the quality of your code and boost your abstract thinking in the object-oriented paradigm.

1. Why Code Quality is Paramount ?

Code quality is the final criterion for shipping and using a product. I believe that high-quality code is the key to the success of any IT business. If the product code is well structured, readable, and extensible, making changes or adding new features is much easier. This saves you a lot of time and ensures the satisfaction of your customers.

High-quality code contributes to effective collaboration between developers. Well-documented, readable code helps team members understand each other’s work, which increases their productivity. On the other hand, if the code is of poor quality (e.g. unreadable), a new developer will invest more time and energy than usual in understanding the code to make changes. High-quality code is easy to understand and requires low development effort.

Another costly problem you may encounter is technical debt. This is the supplementary cost of additional work resulting from choosing a quick fix for quick delivery rather than working on a high-quality product that would take longer. This means that if you postpone the measures that contribute to increasing code quality, the development time of your software will slow down in the medium and long term.

2. What to Do to Improve Code Quality

To improve the quality of your code, the solution to follow is usually a mixture of good architecture based on long-discussed requirements analysis, technical rules, best practices, and refined processes, which we would like to briefly present here:

- Use software architecture models, design patterns, and SOLID principles to produce a code of high-quality and boost your object-oriented thinking and modeling.

- Respect programming concepts such as adherence to a programming language’s recommended coding standard, modularity, and loose coupling to improve code quality aspects like readability and extensibility.

- Follow standard rules and recommendations such as CERT coding standards to eliminate code problems like security issues.

- Use tools such as static analysis tools to solve multiple types of code problems like cognitive complexity.

- Take full advantage of the multiple options that your IDE (Integrated Development Editor) offers, such as the ability to analyze your code or shortcuts to speed up your coding.

- Use logging extensively, which is a good mechanism to track what happens during the execution of an application in a production environment.

- Adhere to processes such as unit testing and debugging. They help identify what went wrong and whether your code meets its requirements. They therefore play a significant role in enhancing the quality of your code.

- Set up a CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Deployment) pipeline to automate the build, test, and deployment processes. Automate all possible tasks in the CI/CD pipeline, such as testing, code analysis, and other quality checking.

For more details on this topic, see my book on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C5VRNKVL