What is Code Quality? Overview + How to Improve Code Quality

There are lots of ways you can improve your code quality, make it easier to review and test and reduce the pain later of having to fix all of the errors. Let's take a look.

You might not realize it, but you probably know when you see bad quality code. It might be written in a way that doesn't make sense, be full of errors, excessively verbose, or highly inconsistent in its use of terminology and naming conventions. Fortunately, there are lots of ways you can improve your code quality, make it easier to review and test and reduce the pain later of having to fix all of the errors. Let's take a look.

What is code quality?

Code quality refers to the attributes and characteristics of your code. These may differ according to your organization's specific business focus and the particular needs of your team. While there's no definitive checklist, there are broadly several things that separate good quality code from poor quality.

Markers of good code :

• Clean
• Consistent
• Functional or useful—the code should do what it says it will do
• Easy to understand for users, not just its author?
• Efficient—good code is succinct?
• Testable—good code should be tested to be free of bugs or defects
• Easy to maintain?
• Easy to build upon, reuse or replicate in the future?
• Well documented—well written and adheres to agreed-upon standards or a style guide

Notably, all of these markers may mean different things to different people or teams. One person may find code clearly written and easy to understand, while another finds it unclear and thus hard to maintain. But it is helpful to have some parameters to work with.?

Documentation, code standards, and style guides

Damian Conway said, ‘Documentation is a love letter that you write to your future self,”

Comments or notes in code are a way to provide a message to your future self on why you might have written code in a certain way. Or why a team member made a particular decision at a specific time. This also provides insights to other team members into your decision-making

Code standards are also helpful to provide uniformity in code across the team. They make it both easier to use and maintain. William Moore describes them as "a sequence of processes for a particular coding language that requires a coding format, the methods, and different procedures."

A style guide provides a company's standard conventions (such as naming conventions) and other best practices within one place. It aims to ensure that code is consistent across all team members, making it easier to work with and review. It should be agreed upon by the team if you want them to actually own and adopt it and may require some training.

Tools for Code Documentation :

1.blankslate.io

2.LateX

3.pandoc

4.Markdown

5. Sphinx

The importance of Code reviews?

Code reviews are of paramount importance to ensuring good code and providing a way to locate problems so that they can be fixed as early as possible. They can also ensure the consistency and reliability of the software you're building. For companies who have adopted a DevOps way of life, code reviews are par for the course and are already embedded in the process as early as possible. The earlier you find errors, the faster, easier, and cheaper they are to resolve.

Tools to review code quality

Most devs already use GitHub to maintain their Git repositories and are accustomed to the use of pull requests and forks to review code. There's also plenty of other tools available that help teams automate the code review process:?

• Codacy
• Code Climate
• CodeGrip
• CodeScene
• Reviewboard
• Smartbear
• SonarQube?
• Veracode?

Code quality and security are similar in that both types of issues can be identified with static analysis. Developers typically use static analytical methods to design and test components. In this instance, the code is not running or executed, but the tool itself executes using the source code as its input data. Static analysis enables devs to also use tooling to discover security issues early, often in real-time as they write code. The tools scan as the dev writes, then flag any security issues in the engineer's integrated development environment (IDE) or editor. By looking at dataflow paths through an application, static analysis tools can identify where an application mishandles data or code produces unintended outcomes.

Static code review software also helps developers understand structure and coding standards and implement their own coding standards. As developers push code directly into production, static code analysis also validates code quality, decreases later errors, and reduces bugs. The tools can identify data mishandling within an app or when code causes unintended consequences

Code refactoring?

Code refactoring in software engineering is the process of restructuring software source code with the purpose to improve its internal structure and non-functional features. At the same time, its external behavior remains unchanged.

The main purpose of code refactoring is pretty clear — to make the code clean, neat, more efficient and maintainable. This process means a kind of software upgrade necessary to improve several non-functional features: maintainability, performance, security, and scalability.

Some Books to Improve Your Code and Your Way of Coding

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”?— M. Fowler

1.Clean Code by Robert Martin

2.The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas & Andrew Hunt

3.Clean Architecture by Robert Martin

4.Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler

Conclusion

Writing good quality code not only leads to higher quality software, but also greater team satisfaction. This is especially important when tools and frameworks and style guides are used to take a lot of the guesswork out of decision making, freeing developers to focus on more interesting tasks