5 Tips to Increase Your Code Quality

Google Chrome uses an estimated 6.7 million lines of code to run.

Code can be very complicated, and small mistakes can cause large problems. Because of this, it’s important to maintain high-quality code at all times. There are several things that you can do to improve your code quality, leading to better results, and making things easier for yourself.

For 5 key tips on improving the quality of your code, keep reading.

What Is Code Quality?

Code is used for a range of IT applications such as web design, software development, and various other technologies. Almost any communication involving computers makes use of code. Smartphone apps generally use several thousand lines of code, while more complicated systems like operating systems can use tens of millions.

When systems are this complex, it’s always ideal to try and simplify things wherever possible. Maintaining high-quality code will ensure a system functions properly, and helps things remain organized. This can be incredibly beneficial when making changes or updates to any code and will reduce the risk of things not working properly.

A small coding mistake can cause all kinds of problems, and the messier the code is, the harder it will be to find any errors. As a coder, you should always make an effort to improve code quality wherever you can. There are several ways that you can do this.

1. Maintain a Consistent Coding Style

Different people tend to have different coding conventions, which often makes things difficult. When looking at code that someone else has written, it can often be a challenge to make sense of it, even if it makes perfect sense to the original coder.

It doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve written their code poorly, just that you write in different styles. It can often take a lot longer to read through code than it does to write new code.

Once you’ve found a writing style that suits you and is easy to read, you should stick to it. Being consistent across different projects will make any of your work easier to understand. This applies to other people looking at it, or even when you’re looking back at your own work from the past.

If you need to make any changes to any old work, you’ll have a much easier time. It will also improve onboarding and cross-team collaboration.

2. Use API Best Practices

There are various options when it comes to APIs (application programming interfaces), data formats, and configurations. You should determine the standards that your team uses to ensure everyone is on the same page. By maintaining high standards, you can ensure a better level of efficiency.

When code is more efficient, the systems that they operate will also be more efficient. As a result, they’ll perform better in environments that may have less power such as mobile and IoT (Internet of Things) devices. As end-users may be using such devices with your systems, this means that user value and experience will also be improved.

By maintaining these practices throughout your company, all teams will be able to work better collaboratively. Overall productivity will also increase, resulting in lower costs.

3. Use a Highly Supported Framework/Library

Using a highly supported framework is one of the best ways to ensure maintainability. When you need to make any changes to old code, you don’t want it to be outdated. If you’ve used libraries that are no longer supported, your code won’t be kept up to date and it may break.

Operations and sustainment can make up the majority of lifecycle costs, so sticking with a supported framework will often save you money in the long run. Maintainable code will generally run faster, reduce technical debt, and have a much lower risk of issues that come from changes. 

4. Use a Code Linter

Code linters are code quality tools that will automatically increase code quality by checking and analyzing it against your company’s coding convention. The linter will show errors as warnings wherever your code doesn’t match up.

People often prioritize speed over quality, which can lead to these kinds of errors being overlooked. While they may not initially seem like an issue, they can build up and start to cause some major problems.

As a result, a lot of work will need to be done to go back through and remove these errors. It’s best to highlight these and deal with them early on to keep things running smoothly.

5. Leave Comments

When writing code, it’s possible to leave notes throughout which don’t affect the code itself. Developers can use these to explain different sections of code so that anyone looking at it can get a better understanding of what the different parts are.

It’s important to balance these comments. Too many can make things cluttered and messy to read, while too few can make it difficult for people to understand what they’re looking at.

You should write comments for highly complex functions to save people time. It’s also a good idea to put a comment at the top of each file and class to clearly (but briefly) explain what they are.

Improving Your Code Quality

Improving your code quality will help both yourself and others. If you regularly collaborate with other team members, following the same practices will make things easier and more efficient for everyone.

As a coder, there are various other ways you can improve your work. Check out this guide for some habits that highly successful software developers have.