Understanding Code Quality & Simple Tips To Improve It

Code quality determines how useful your code is in the longer run. High-quality code can be re-used and re-developed, reducing the technical debt and improving speed to market. 

Time and resource optimization are essential for businesses to succeed. However, tricky deadlines and tight budgets may compel developers to cut corners, but that’s not beneficial in the long run. Instead, it is better to spend a little more time on developing high-quality code that is reliable and prevents rework in the future.

What is Code Quality and Why is it Important?

Code quality is a term that denotes good quality or poor quality code. The quality of code is still a subjective concept, as what is high quality for a web application developer may not be so for an automotive developer. That being said, some common factors determine the quality of the code.

 At the most basic level, good code:

• Does what it should
• Follows a consistent style
• Is easy to understand
• Has been well-documented
• Can be tested flawlessly

As you can gauge, producing quality code has several advantages for software development. Professional software developers consistently focus on writing quality code as it offers a higher ROI on their efforts in the long run. 

Below, we have identified some reasons highlighting the importance of quality code in software development:

• Clean and consistent code is easier to understand and maintain. It can also be extended or re-used with minimal effort
• Quality code is highly readable. It is also well-documented, which makes it simpler to review and reduces the development effort
• Well-designed software achieves lower code complexity. It is more robust, less prone to bugs, and also easier to test
• High code quality reduces technical debt, which refers to the implied cost of additional work due to the usage of a limited solution instead of a better approach.

What are the Coding Standards?

Coding standards can be defined as a collection of coding guidelines, rules and best practices that help you write cleaner code. 

Coding standards also promote sound programming practices and improve efficiency, while ensuring your software is:

• Safe and secure so that it cannot be hacked, and used without causing harm
• Reliable, easily maintainable and works as it should, even as the codebase grows
• Testable, even at the code level
• Portable or compatible with various implementation environments and produces consistent results

Whether you are a beginner or an experienced software developer, always follow the right coding standards and industry best practices to write clean, reliable, and secure code. This not only avoids future rework as your codebase grows but also accelerates the time to market and performance of the software.

By following coding standards, you also ensure compliance with industry standards like ISO and IEC automatically, apart from enhancing the security, consistency, and reliability of your code. 

Some of the general coding standards are limiting the use of globals, using standard headers for different modules, and avoiding the use of identifiers for multiple purposes. These standards also guide software developers to document their code properly, use a simple coding style, use proper indentation and follow the standard naming conventions for variables, constants, and functions.

Measuring Code Quality

Five key factors are used to measure code quality are:

• Reliability – This measures whether the system will run over a specific period. Low defect count is the hallmark of a reliable codebase.
• Maintainability – This measures if the software can be easily maintained, which depends on the size, structure, and complexity of the codebase.
• Testability – Quality code is crucial for developing quality software that supports testing at the code level. Testability can be measured by the number of test cases required to find potential faults in the system.
• Portability – By testing the code on different platforms, you can determine platform independency or its performance in different environments. Quality code is portable and performs consistently in different environments.
• Reusability – Lesser interdependencies imply the code is re-usable, which is a prized characteristic to speed future development.

While these factors determine the quality of code, it is also important to quantify these characteristics or use a base metric to test quality. The most popular way to check is by using defect metrics that use the number and severity of defects to indicate the overall code quality.

Tips on Improving Code Quality

1. Follow Coding Standards

As we touched upon previously, following coding standards is imperative to writing quality code that is consistent with industry standards. To ensure this, we suggest that you start by listing the coding conventions and picking the ones that the whole team is going to follow throughout to make the process consistent and efficient. 

2. Write Legible Code

Quality code is also legible and easily understandable code. To make sure your code is readable, go through it impartially to determine whether you can understand it one reading or not. 

If not, you need to simplify it. Of course, if you follow the industry best practices while writing code, it is bound to be legible and easy to read for most software developers. You can simplify the code further by using well-named functions, classes, and variables, and grouping common code into separate files for better classification of code.

3. Continuous Testing

The fewer the bugs the higher is the quality of your code. This points to the importance of proper testing to ensure the software works as it is intended to, which is the benchmark of high-quality code. 

We suggest having an appropriate test strategy in place to test the expected use cases. For example, test-driven development is an excellent practice to follow as it forces you to write down the tests before you proceed with writing the code. This gives you a clearer idea of what you need to feed to your code and what it will churn out – which also speeds up the development process. 

It is also essential to use different tiers of testing, including the largest number of unit tests followed by a lesser number of integration and end-to-end tests. 

4. Code Review

Code review is the test of fire that will tell you how easily or well your code is understood by others. Code review requires that at least two pairs of eyes, including the author of the code for reviewing. Various things can be checked during the review, such as whether the code breaks any convention rules, maintainability and scope of the code, and error handling.

Most teams conduct reviews within themselves, but if you don’t work with a team, you can arrange with a colleague or developer friend to review each other’s codes as needed. 

5. Make Use of a Linter While Developing

Code linter reads your code and send you warnings if your code is not compliant with the standards of a coding language to prevent issues in the future. By using a linter for the language or the framework you are using, you can effortlessly enforce the accepted set of standards for the language in use, ironing out a lot of creases that may eat up your time in the later stages of development. 

6. Use Comments Judiciously

Writing too many or too few comments will not give you any benefit. Rather, you should only add comments when they provide value. For example, it is good practice to write a short comment at the top of a file to introduce the scope of the code within. Similarly, a brief comment at the beginning of every class may be added to introduce its primary goals and scope. For function-level comments, we suggest being judicious and only add comments when the function is complicated or lengthy to save time.

In an increasingly digital world, software developers are in high demand, and it’s imperative to acquaint yourself with best coding practices to give yourself and your employer a competitive edge in the market. 

If you are looking for a software developer position, you can also empower your job search by signing up on Talent500 – a talent discovery platform to get placed with Fortune 500 companies and top MNCs globally.