When developers come together from different angles to form a team, one issue usually arises — code quality. For a single developer, this may not be a problem. But for a team, it becomes one because code quality can either improve the rate of development or impair it.

In this article, we will look at what code quality entails and 5 ways of improving code quality in teams.

What is code quality?

Coding is not all about the apps built. While that is the end result of code, the internals are the most important. Bad code results in unsatisfying applications that will negatively affect the users and the team behind them.

Code quality is a term used to describe how readable, understandable, ordered, and maintainable (to name a few) a source code is. Readability and orderliness influence understandability and they all influence maintainability.

Code understandability is a noteworthy factor in teams as both present and future developers should be able to easily comprehend the code that another developer has written.

Code is called ‘maintainable’ when additions and subtractions (generally improvements) can be achieved easily. If the code quality is poor, maintaining the code may require more time than normal, and until the code quality is ensured, you’ll be losing time continuously.

Now that you know what code quality is and its benefits, let’s look at a few ways of improving it.

Five Strategies for Better Code Quality

1. Concise comments on codes

When developers want to comment their code, some usually overdo it. Overdoing does not always look nice. However, comments are a great start for the journey of code quality.

When a new developer approaches a code with concise comments, they will have an easier time understanding what’s happening, what happened, or what’s about to happen.

Here’s an example of a not so great comment:

// get all user's posts
const getUsersPosts = () => {
...
}

As seen above, the comment is already very similar to the function’s name. Without the function, we can already deduce that the posts are collected from database.

A better comment:

// check DB to confirm if ticket exists
// all the required information for tickets are available
const verifyTicket = id => {
...
}

Just hearing verifyTicketdoes not really explain what happens. But with the comment above, it can be understood what’s happening within the code.

Even when the literal code implementation may be difficult to digest, good comments can serve as a quick explanation of the implementation.

If your team has not adopted comments or hardly uses them, you should encourage them to start. It may seem irrelevant to your current team (because of their level of experience perhaps), but you won’t be working with the same set of people forever so it’s important to get into the habit of using concise comments.

#software-development #code-quality