Code Quality Assurance - The Best Practices

Code Quality
Code quality is important, essential and perhaps the most overlooked when it comes to any type of project. Especially in the modern tech industry, code quality has become vital to the performance of the whole application and the overall user experience. It is no longer just about "making it work" anymore.

Good code is not only a result of merely keeping it simple or removing unused features, as personal or peer code reviews are the main contributing factors when it comes to ensuring product quality and a collaborative environment between your programmers. Code quality assurance may be difficult as the project capacity increases, so here are some of the top valued practices I've gathered and learned so far in my career that you can implement today for your project's benefit.

Peer Review
Peer code reviews can often seem unproductive at times, especially in a big project with strict deadlines. However, they are the most effective when the reviewers can find a balance or middle ground between correction and communication.

• Have a standard - Always remember what the end goal here is: to prevent bugs. No two programmers have a similar coding style. In addition to that, many teams today do not have a standard process for fixing bugs. One solution to combat these dilemmas and improve the project's life cycle is to have a set of standards put in place. These standards can range from having property accessors(getters and setters) located at the bottom of the file to how file trees are constructed. This practice can not only improve consistency all throughout the application, but it can also help familiarize even the new programmers to the code base and make the debugging process much smoother, as the programmer would then be able to notice patterns and pinpoint the bug in certain areas of the project. 

• Take your limited time - Everything in general can be refined when given the appropriate amount of time. The process of coding, debugging and code reviewing is no exclusion. The practice of taking one's time combined with having a coding standard will increase the chance of finding defects within the code base before they make it into the production environment. With that being said, it is recommended that code reviews should not take over 60 minutes as that is the point in time where a person's performance can start declining. Holding more frequent reviews is one way to combat this as it reduces the need to conduct lengthy code reviewing sessions.

Self Review

Of course, there is no better way to mitigate potential bugs in the application than starting off the development process with a good foundation as it saves time and effort that can be better spent elsewhere. Here are two of the main key aspects that can guide you and your peers into writing quality code.

• Reliability - Ensure that the feature you are developing can run as expected while at the same time anticipating potential failures. Reliable software is a result of good planning, as it ensures that the developer is well equipped with the requirements needed and the route to take to solve a problem. This means that the developer will have less back-tracking to do between files which increases the risk of adding unnecessary lines of code. Changing a plan can be easy, but changing code surely is not.

• Maintainability - Ensure that you are applying the concept of minimalism all throughout your code. Unnecessary properties, features and functions only provide more confusion to other members in your team, especially during code review. In other words, writing maintainable code is equal to writing understandable code. This includes adding comments near areas of complex logic, function and property naming conventions, and applying indentation even in places such as html elements. 

Conclusion

The benefits of code quality assurance is not just be able to refine the application for performance, but an opportunity to create a collaborative environment to learn from other team members which then makes the whole development process easier, without compromising individuality in writing code. Understanding the importance of finding a balance during peer and self code reviews or even knowing how essential having a good planning session can be will surely improve productivity within any team of developers, which is undoubtedly necessary in today's tech industry.