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Five coding best practices to improve code quality

With over 37 billion open source components combined in the most popular open source ecosystems, keeping your code in top shape can feel like trying to blow out trick birthday candles. Luckily, the newest code quality course from the Sonatype Learn team, 5 Ways to Improve Your Code Quality, outlines a few essential coding best practices to maintain outstanding code quality.

We're rounding up the biggest takeaways from this interactive and comprehensive course. After reading this, you'll be able to understand what makes quality code, how to avoid bad coding habits, and how to achieve new code quality heights that will help you spend less time fixing broken code and more time breaking development boundaries.

How to define code quality

Quality code does what it's intended to do. Excellent code quality follows a consistent style, is easy to understand, is well documented, and can be tested. As noted in the course, there are five pillars that support the software development life cycle (SDLC): Readability, performance, maintainability, reliability/resiliency, and security. By focusing on the development of each pillar, you can increase the entire quality and health of your software supply chain.

These coding good habits are non-functional requirements of the code. They don't determine the functions or algorithms you should use. Instead, they influence how the code is written and structured. Unlike functional requirements that specify what a system does, these quality pillars ensure code remains robust and maintainable. They shape development practices and system architecture, and they should be part of any development project from initial design through maintenance.

We've outlined the top five coding best practices to help you think of the "how" to improve code quality.

Our top 5 coding best practices

Improve readability: How to write better code

Tip 1: Create and enforce a consistent coding style

If you've ever said to yourself, "dang, this documentation is horrible" this one is for you. Time spent reading code is often 10 times greater than the time it takes to write new code. Poor readability frequently impacts interdepartmental and cross-team collaboration.

It's easier to understand code when developers know what to expect and where to look. You can do this through consistent variable naming conventions, commenting styles, line formatting, use of white space, and nesting, just to name a few. Modern development environments include linters that can improve code quality by enforcing coding best practices for particular languages.

As explained in the course:

"When your goal is to write new code, you have to understand the context, what you're changing, and the impact that has. With readable code, new team members have an easier time wrapping their heads around the code base when it's easily understandable and approachable."

Once you improve readability, you can expect:

  1. Easier onboarding

  2. More efficient cross-team collaboration

  3. Better maintainability (another important non-functional requirement)

Improve performance: How fast should it be?

Tip 2: Implement API best practices

Efficient performance is essential to monitoring development budgets and end-user value impacts. Reports show that companies across all industries may be overspending on cloud services by an average of 42%. Establishing a standard for the APIs your team will use, along with data formats and configurations, is an excellent starting point. Incorporating automation to scan for these elements will help ensure consistent, high performance for your team.

Efficient performance lets you run in lower-resource environments like mobile and IoT, broadening your reach. You're able to do more with less power, and these all directly relate to user value.

An institution of API best practices will give your team access to:

  1. Cost savings

  2. Broader reach in lower-resource environments

Improve maintainability: How will it keep running?

Tip 3: Choose a highly supported library/framework

Maintainability refers to how easily code can be modified or updated. Well-supported libraries that receive frequent updates are less likely to disrupt your software, as they stay current and compatible over time.

It's estimated that operations and sustainment costs comprise 70-90% of lifecycle costs. Making your code easily maintainable lowers risks associated with change, speeds productivity, and reduces technical debt.

While the course outlines more ways to do this, using a highly supported framework will get you:

  1. Lower maintenance and support costs

  2. Easier product changes

Improve reliability/resiliency: How will it recover after failure?

Tip 4: Eliminate memory errors and resource leaks

Reliability measures the level of risk inherent in your software and the likelihood it will fail, while resilience measures the ability to deal with failure. Common failures result from memory errors like null pointer exceptions and resource leaks that degrade performance.

It's estimated that, in Fortune 1000 companies, the average total cost of unplanned application downtime per year is $1.25 - $2.5 billion. "Unplanned" means inconvenience for both the company and its supporting users, and equally frustrating for both groups.

Mitigating these issues well means:

  1. Better user experience

  2. Lower cloud expenses (less replication needed)

Improve security: How is it safe?

Tip 5: Control information flow

There is a constant flow of information between sources and services that leaves countless opportunities for a breach. Security is a code quality measure that considers the number of vulnerabilities found, the time to resolve those (in production environments), the ease of deploying patches, and actual security incidents/breaches.

To control the flow of information, use tools that scan for vulnerabilities earlier in the development lifecycle, test early in development by measuring code quality, and introduce tools that reduce risk in your code. Customers will remain confident in your business when you do this because they know you care about security, and you'll have overall reduced risk in your ecosystems.

Improved security will result in:

  1. Less risk

  2. Enhanced customer confidence

Keep learning how to write better code

Find even more tips and insight into the five pillars of code quality when you take the course 5 Ways to Improve Your Code Quality. Once you get a grasp on the pillars that hold up your SDLC, there will be no stopping you from crushing your development goals this year. Good luck out there! You'll be so glad you made it to the other side once you start.



CREDITS

Picture of Keiana King

Written by Keiana King

Keiana is a Digital Marketing Copywriter at Sonatype with a passion for brand communication. Based in Brooklyn, NY and originally from Northern Virginia, Keiana studied Product and Brand Management at Virginia Commonwealth University. When she's not gawking over her favorite brands she's out ...