What is code quality?
Quality is just an adjective as usual. Code quality means high quality code and poor-quality code. The bad or good is entirely subjective here. Here different term has been used on the programming context. Code quality is the medium to communicate with the end users. Quality of the code is measured with different parameters, because a multiple professionals of IT industry are working with code including an automotive developer, web application developer, software developer, and web designer. So, they measure the code quality according to their working objectives.
Here will take an in-depth eye on code quality, and I’s efficacy to improve a web application, different tools to achieve quality code, and why the code review is necessary. This article will make you understand the basics of code quality.
Let’s take a brief on code quality?
If you are planning to start a business, a professional website is mandatory. You can’t ignore the value of a high-end websites. Web designers now focusing on the UX/ UI. At this point code quality plays an important role. When a website is under development, it may face different constraints at different phase. A quality code usually offers high security of the website. If a website is built with poor coding language, it will be prone to cyber-attack.
There are different elements need to be considered when you want to measure code quality. Here we will mention the fundamental factors:
Consistency & readability: A code should be consistent, that means it should feel like it has written on a single stretch. The code should have high readability, that refers to easy to read, and understand. To increase readability, the code must be written and documented very clearly.
Robustness and predictability: The website behaviour should be predictable, and not susceptible to hidden bugs.
Maintenance and security: We said earlier that a consistent code provide security to your website. So, updating, fixing and improving your website will be convenient.
Why code quality is an essential part of web designing?
Writing a high-quality code is an essential investment for your website functionality. To write a simple and effective code a programmer needs decent experience and expertise.
A high-quality code should:
- Be simple, clear, concise, and elegant.
- Highly readable, consistent, and code documentation must be easy to review, and that leads to significantly reduced development effort
- Be Understandable and easily editable
- Be consistent, with high robustness. It means your website is less prone to new bugs being introduced
- Your website should me made up with a lower code complexity, that makes the whole process manageable while testing.
Simply we would say a professional quality code used to save your website from various kinds of technical issues.
Lack of coding standard, poor documentation, below quality website design architecture with no prior categorized responsibilities, and high complexity lead to poor coding style.
How to achieve professional code quality for your website?
There are few fundamental things you need to consider while developing a high-quality code, Such as:
- Apply proper comments on each method, logic and functions
- Delete unused commented code that you leave as it is while developing the code
- Write reusable and generalized code
- Apply proper data types, names of the variables, properties, classes, and methods.
- Add proper casting when required
- Try to avoid loops, as it directly impacts the website performance
- Use basic fundamentals to make an overall clear, understandable architecture
- Code review is important part after writing a code
Different types of tools to achieve quality code for your website?
SonarLint:
It is an open-source IDE extension allow you to detect and fix quality issues of your code. SonarLint find out the flaws of the code that need to checked and fixed before implementation.
The SonarLint code review tool has following features:
- Bug detection, find out tricky bugs, common vulnerabilities
- Provide instant feedback on any mistakes are reported just like spell-checker tool
- Uncover old coding issues you have made before
- You can learn from your mistakes,
SonarQube:
SonarQube colloquially known as Sonar is an open-source tool that is appropriate to measure and analyse the quality of the code.
Features:
- Continuous inspection
- Direct tricky issues
- DevOps integration
- Centralized quality
StyleCop: This tool is used to check the consistency of the code. It convinces the developers to follow a particular set of rules to maintain the consistency of the code. Set of rules include:
- Documentation
- Maintainability
- Layout
- Readability
- Naming
- Spacing
- Ordering
These are the common tool used by Web development company to review and edit their code. Code reviewing is essential part after writing an high quality code to check it’s performance.