How to ship high-quality code faster
All software is built using code. Today, the software we’ve come to rely on in our everyday lives is ubiquitous across our society, at home, and at work. Without fail, the software and applications gaining the most adoption and stickiness, are the ones that rise to success through rapid innovation, and superior user experience.
So, as the software is code, code then becomes the building block of our online interactions, and the quality of this has a huge impact on the overall software quality and hence its successful user adoption.
One of the biggest issues for software development projects is the lack of time they are afforded for code quality processes. Due to increasingly tighter deadlines and workloads, code quality is often rushed or ill-thought through. Sustainable, high-quality, and rapid programming is now a priority for executives across all parts of the public and private sector.
Why are code reviews important?
“Strive for perfection in everything you do”.
Sir Henry Royce
Automobile Engineer and co-founder of Rolls Royce
Code reviews are akin to your favorite sports team practicing and perfecting before the ultimate showdown. It helps you to identify your styling mistakes, bugs, logical errors, and even spelling mistakes. Code reviews, therefore, improve code quality and maintainability, as well as ensuring your software meets the standards your organization, or the industry has set out.
Unfortunately, developers rarely go through code review processes for want of time, as these processes demand a lot of human effort and tenacity. On the flip side, poor quality code being shipped today has an immediate impact on bottom-line costs with higher maintenance, modification, and adjustment costs. Topline revenue is also impacted through poor or inferior user experiences.
What does good code quality look like?
Code quality is considered to be good if it is
- Simple and easy to understand
- Follows best practices and design patterns
- Consistent with its code style
- Testable
How is Code quality tested?
Organizations mostly resort to manual code reviews, which have both a high labor usage and are hugely less effective. For example, in a study, “Software defect origins and removal methods”1 it was found that manual forms of software testing are only 35% effective, with programmers able to detect only 1 out of 3 bugs.
More modern approaches for code quality testing are slightly more practical and are done by performing ‘Static Code Analysis’. This is done by programmers in a non-run time environment. In other words, developers can test their code without executing it.
One of the biggest benefits of this approach is that it helps ensure organizational code standards are met before the code is deployed, which in-turn help reduce ongoing cost and effort.
The principle of “doing things right the first time”
History shows us that the crisis of quality that crept into American factories in the late 70’s due to the onslaught of Japanese high-quality products, encouraged Philip Bayard Crosby2 to create the principle of ‘doing things right the first time’.
Software development today is also striving towards Crosby’s vision of ‘zero defects’ through quality by design principles. Certainly, as we move into the next phase of software, manual processes are out of the question, as human error is inevitable. The advent of automated code quality and Artificial Intelligence-based software development and testing has led to huge improvements to the code quality processes, providing superior software and user experiences.
MuleSoft Code reviewing is now automated
IntegralZone, a UK-based software development company, has developed automated code review software which automatically checks MuleSoft project source code, as it’s typed. Prompting developers within their development environments, to help meet compliance with a predefined set of rules or best practices. With automation tools such as these, developers are assisted, and learn while they are developing, in real-time.
These types of tools typically employ enforced rules to highlight when the code deviates from a set of programming standards. Through in-line and real-time software reviews, these solutions deliver code reviews at a much faster pace, eliminate human error, improves code coverage, and are highly cost-effective.
IT Leaders are of the view that adopting such solutions will aid in their far-reaching technological transformations and innovation, as they identify that almost 50% of their time is spent on manually identifying and fixing software errors.
IZAnalyzer from Integral Zone is a simple plug-in that can work with the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform.
Developers can proactively identify bug lists, vulnerabilities, and code smells — to ship their MuleSoft projects faster and with more confidence. It also ends the problem of latent defect discovery with an ‘on the fly results’ feature, where developers can review their code quality on the fly while writing code in their development environment.
With in-line guidance, IZAnalyzer acts as a real-time code reviewer to help developers perform complex code reviews with ease.
Now, MuleSoft code can be shipped faster and more efficiently with automated code analysis using IZ Analyzer.
Follow the below link to try IZ Analyzer for Free!
References:
1“Software defect origins and removal methods” is a 2012 study authored by Capers Jones.
2Philip Bayard Crosby was a Quality Expert and Author who contributed to Quality Management theories and practices. He introduced the concept of ‘Zero Defects’ in his book ‘Quality is Free’ (1979) as a Management tool aimed at the reduction of defects through prevention.