What Is Code Quality?

High-quality code (safe, secure, reliable, and so on) will perform to or exceed your customers’ expectations. Not only will it instill trust and confidence that your organization runs a sound business, but that you deliver quality products and it’s not worth the risk of going elsewhere.

Code that is safe, secure, reliable, and of quality should be considered for reuse, especially if it was written with portability in mind. This will cut your development and testing costs dramatically in future products.

Implementing code quality procedures like code reviews, static analysis, unit testing, code coverage, and more will reduce the amount of rework and costs (technical debt).

This would have to be paid if these methods were deemphasized or omitted from the software development lifecycle.

The highest costs to technical debt will be incurred once the product is out in the field, so a careful balance between code quality and delivery of speed needs to be considered.

Good code that’s not just well architected but also well implemented can be easily and quickly enhanced with new capabilities or new features. This gives longevity and opportunities for ongoing revenue gains — no matter what algorithm changes or technology updates might occur.

Code quality also contributes to the ease of maintainability and low labor costs if software issues do arise.

Convene with your fellow software engineers and systematically check each other’s code for mistakes and coding style violations. This activity has been shown to accelerate and substantially improve code quality.

Write code to handle not just the sunny day scenarios, but rainy days too. Also, perform negative testing, which is to apply as much creativity as possible when validating the application against invalid data.

For safety-critical applications, make sure to apply a static analysis solution like MISRA, AUTOSAR C++ 14, or other coding standards that will identify the use of coding constructs that are unsafe (divide by zero, use of a NULL pointer and so) and can cause a dreadful condition.

For applications that need to be secure, make sure to apply a static analysis solution like CERT, OWASP, or other coding standards that will identify insecure and vulnerable conditions (buffer overflows, information leakage, script injection, and so on) for an attack.

Write code that’s easy to read and understand. Don’t be too clever and write cryptic code that’s hard to follow or easily misunderstood. You don’t want other engineers or yourself to spend a lot of time trying to decipher a bug in your code. Rooting out an odd indentation, niche formatting, or errant lines of code takes time. All of that refactoring adds inefficiency and cost to projects, which affects the maintainable quality of code.

Write code that doesn’t have a large number of branches. The more branches, the higher the code complexity and the higher number of bugs found in the code. Reduce branches by building functions to break up the complexity. However, remember that complexity measures and complexity metrics play roles in the maintainability, reliability, and readability of your codebase. It also simplifies pull requests. For more information about these software metrics, consider Halstead complexity measures in order to measure complexity from the source code.

Write code with portability in mind. Portable code, such as POSIX, ANSI C, and more, can be easily and quickly moved to other platforms either to use with other compilers or other operating systems and can be done with minimal changes to facilitate the migration. Many times, there are financial opportunities or reasons why running on another operating system or target needs to happen.

Write code with well-defined interfaces so that it can be reused in future products or projects. This improves productivity in the workflow and reduces labor and testing costs. Many open source projects found on sites like Github offer great examples of code clarity and reusability given the nature of the projects.