Top 9 Best Practices for Improving Software Coding Standards

The world is moving online. Naturally, creating websites to showcase their abilities is on the rise. If a website is designed well, it contributes to your reach and growth by many folds. On the contrary, bad site design with sub-standard code jeopardizes your online presence immensely. It lowers your SEO ranking, increases the loading time, frustrates your customers, and squashes potential opportunities. Hence, maintaining high code quality standards is a priority for all businesses that want to drive their business through the internet.‍

Here’s why code quality standards are critical: –

What are the Coding Standards?

It’s a sequence of processes for a particular coding language that requires a coding format, methods, and different procedures. Establishing a programming guideline gives a clear message to all developers to adopt one style of code. Such a consistent code brings uniformity and simplifies its usage and maintenance.

Maintaining consistency throughout your program improves your code level and page loading effectively. The guideline should be unambiguous and followed through to all stages of the code. In the end, your program feels like it’s consistent throughout and written by a single coder.

Coding Standard Importance in Software Development

In the absence of a standard coding procedure, coders utilize their styles to program the project. So, you get different functionalities that may not work well together. A lack of clear and consistent rules causes various security concerns and performance issues. Inconsistent code exposes your site to frequent cyberattacks and causes harm to your data. Since every developer uses a different standard, fixing and upgrading code becomes cumbersome and time-consuming.

Benefits of Coding Standards to Improve Code Quality

Improves Efficiency

Reduces Project Failure

Eases Code Maintenance

Writing uniform code eases maintenance by reducing bug detection time. If you decide to switch your IT firm, your new coder can easily navigate through the program to find and rectify bugs.

Creates Clean and Cost-efficient Code

Pushing for code standards gives you clean and reusable code that drastically reduces your developmental costs and efforts. Reusing the same code saves you time and ensures you deliver before the deadline.

Best Practices to Improve Code Quality

Best Practices to Improve Code Quality[/caption]Most of your code quality issues arise during the software development process. Your developers can address and resolve a lot of these issues by imbibing code quality best practices. Here are some examples of the same.

1. Use Code Comments and Proper Documentation

Putting comments on your code assists other programmers to comprehend your work quickly. Using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and other tools, you can use commenting differently. Begin each function with a comment on its purpose, what parameters it uses and manipulates, and any exception it throws. Explaining the role of each class, file, and nested code helps them grasp the coding functionality completely.

2. Indent your Code

Indenting your code is highly advisable to increase code readability. There are no industry standards on indentation. You can make up your style and specify it in the guidelines to showcase code consistency.

3. Avoid Over-commenting

While commenting is a great coding practice, ensure you don’t over-comment and explain obvious functionalities. This malpractice makes your code look clumsy, unattractive, and unprofessional.

4. Group your Code

Grouping your code using methods and separating them with proper spaces improves code readability. Additionally, putting a short and informative comment at the start of each block reduces over-commenting.

5. Use a Consistent Naming Scheme

Consider using a common naming scheme for all your functions, methods, classes, and files. By following this guideline, you distinguish among them and foster greater understanding. The two industry-standard naming conventions are:-

CamelCase

In this guideline, each word’s first letter (except the first one) is in the capital. For example, get Parameters() uses this rule.

Underscore

This convention uses an underscore to separate words. For example, get parameters() follows the underscore rule.

6. Avoid Duplication

Developers should adhere to the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) guideline while programming. Ensure you write your program and avoid copying the code recklessly. Coders should keep the program crisp, pointed, and original to improve its quality.

7. Avoid Complicated Nesting Code

Simplify your code significantly by avoiding code nesting as much as you can. Avoiding deep nesting improves code comprehension and reduces bug correction time.

8. Shorten your Line Lengths

Use narrow columns and short lines to ease readability across your project. Try to ensure each code line doesn’t exceed 80 characters.

9. Organize your Files and Folders Systematically

You could write all your code in one file. However, we don’t recommend it for readability and maintenance issues. Instead, try a modular approach to coding by creating different files and organizing them well.

Tools to Analyze Code Quality

Sonar Lint

This app detects bugs, provides instant advice, and exposes old issues.

Sonar Qube

This tool inspects continuously, recognizes severe issues, centralizes quality, and integrates DevOps.

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Conclusion

Software development is an integral part of your business strategy. By improving site performance, you engage leads, maintain customer relations, and improve your SEO ranking significantly. Adopt efficient code quality practices today!