How do you ensure the quality of your code?

Code quality is a major factor in software development. Quality code reduces the likelihood of bugs, errors, and vulnerabilities while enhancing the codebase’s overall readability, maintainability, performance, and security.

So, let’s see how we can ensure the quality of our code.

1. Understand the Requirement

When you collect feature requirements, you need to understand them thoroughly and create a breakdown of the task into stories. It will help you understand the solution and come up with the perfect code for that. As an additional benefit, coders will get a proper idea of managing their code within the given timeline. So, it will reduce the stress and make your coding more sustainable and quality.

2. Version Controlling

Software development often involves a large number of developers. However, maintaining quality code can be challenging when multiple developers work on the same codebase, as you need to maintain the same coding standards and practices across the codebase.

That’s where version control comes in. Version control allows several developers to develop and merge code on the same codebase without encountering problems or losing work.

The following are some benefits of using a version control system.

• Teamwork and developer efficiency are increased when numerous developers collaborate on the same codebase simultaneously without running afoul of one other or losing work.
• Version control keeps a copy of the codebase so that errors or mishaps can be corrected.
• When there is a clear history of changes in the code, it is simpler to comprehend who made modifications and why. This can enhance accountability and openness within a team.

3. Use Code Reviews

Code reviews is a process where one or more developers go through another developer’s work and provide suggestions for improvements. Code reviews are essential to ensuring code quality since they allow you to write the best version of the code by getting expertise from all the team members. The following are some advantages of code reviews.

• Facilitates developer cooperation, enhancing communication and teamwork.
• It gives team members a means of exchanging best practices and expertise, which raises the code’s overall quality.
• Early bug detection increases the code’s overall reliability.
• Collaborating helps you improve your knowledge and share it with others.

However, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind.

• Code reviews should be conducted in a secure environment where developers may give candid and helpful criticism to one another.
• Comments should be helpful and directed toward improving the code rather than criticizing the person.
• Code reviews should be done as a team, with several developers contributing comments and cooperating to improve the code.

4. Using Coding Standards

When you write new code, it should be consistent with all the standards, styles, and practices followed in the codebase. When your team follows the same coding standard, all codes are more readable and easy to maintain. Also, the quality remains consistent in every part of the code.

Here are some of the coding standards that you can follow:

• Google Java Style Guide: A style guide for Java programming that covers formatting, naming conventions, and other best practices.
• PEP 8 (Python Enhancement Proposal 8): A style guide for Python code, providing guidelines on indentation, naming conventions, and more.
• Airbnb JavaScript Style Guide: A popular style guide for JavaScript.
• Microsoft C# Coding Conventions: A set of conventions for writing clean and maintainable C# code. It covers aspects like naming, formatting, and organization.

But you don’t need to memorize these standards; you can use tools to automatically enforce or suggest them to you.

• Linters: ESLint (JavaScript/TypeScript), Pylint (Python), Rubocop (Ruby)
• Formatters: Prettier (JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS), Black (Python), Clang-Format (C++, C, Java)
• Code review tools: GitHub Code Review, Gerrit, Crucible (Atlassian)
• IDEs with built-in support: Visual Studio Code, PyCharm, IntelliJ IDEA

5. Refactor Your Code Regularly

Code refactoring involves rewriting parts of the code without changing its functionality to improve its readability, performance, and maintainability. However, there are a few things you need to consider since refactoring can cause unexpected issues in your application.

• Update test cases: Ensure your test cases are written or updated to reflect the changes made during refactoring. This helps verify that your code still functions as intended after modifications.
• Maintain API documentation: The API documentation you have created should be updated with changes in real time. This will help everyone understand the code better.
• Make incremental changes: Make small, incremental changes rather than large alterations. Minor adjustments make identifying and fixing flaws easier and also make it easy to roll back to earlier versions when needed.

Wrapping Up

Maintaining a high standard of code quality is essential in creating reliable applications. Understanding requirements properly, using version control, doing regular code reviews, following coding standards, and refactoring your code when needed are small yet highly effective ways to improve the quality of your code. So, make sure you follow these steps when you start writing your next code line.