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Working in or with an offshore development company demands excellent performance. Code quality is essential in this event, as it should be in any case. To ensure you have the required type of code on hand for your work, you need to know how to track it.
There are also several methods you can use to enhance code quality wherever and whenever possible. Not sure how to go about all this? We’ll help you out in defining code quality and tracking it here. This way, you can avoid the risk of misdelivery and know that your team will meet the needed standards.
Defining Code Quality
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Having decent or good code quality is easy to say, but how exactly do we measure it? This requires looking at how the code fulfills certain requirements and whether it has the attributes you deem important to your business. You should go over these requirements with your development team so there are no confusions about the goal.
The main attributes in general for high code quality include the following:
- Clarity: Code should be easy to read by any third party. They should understand it in order to maintain or extend it when needed.
- Maintenance: One should also be able to easily understand the code’s context in case they want to change up a few things.
- Well Documented: The best codes are self-explaining, but it’s even better if one can add on some components to explain the code’s functions. This way, even someone who wasn’t a part of the code’s creation can make sense of it.
- Refactoring: This refers to the code formatting, which should be as consistent as possible. It should also take into account the coding conventions of the language used.
- Tested: Your code should also have regular filtering and testing to do away with any bugs. Fewer bugs translate to higher code quality. Rigorous testing also ensures that the resulting software works in the way it’s meant to.
- Extendibility: Any code you get should be extendible. Otherwise, it might become useless after a few weeks.
- Efficiency Level: You know a code is of high quality when it doesn’t need too many additional resources in order to work properly.
Keep in mind that every single code you receive or work on won’t meet every one of these requirements. The more it meets, however, the more you can be sure of its high quality. Treat the list above like a priority checklist that you can change up according to what your business demands.
You can also apply certain metrics so you can get a quantitative measurement of your code’s quality. These include the following:
- Weighted Micro Function Points
- Halstead complexity measures
- Cyclomatic complexity
You can also ensure that your code remains of top quality through frequent code reviews, function testing, and unit testing.
How to Track Quality Code
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When you’re in constant communication with your team, you’re likely to reduce the risk of misdelivery. However, you might still be unaware of what’s going on within the software itself. When you gain knowledge of this area, you can then ensure code quality in the best manner.
For this, you need a good software configuration management tool. One of the most common and most popular of these is called GIT. Almost all of all software development teams are making use of this tool.
You should also tell your software development team to use GitHub or a similar service for code sharing plus publishing. This would let you see how your team builds the project together and gives you an idea of the code quality level.
For bug tracking, you should use the common tool JIRA. More than 40% of the respondents make use of this to track and repair bugs and also manage projects. It does so by utilizing nitrated kanban and scrum boards, thus enabling the management and creation of sprints. Plus, it enables visibility where teams and their projects are concerned.
Finally, you can consider using Confluence, which is a sharing tool for documents and specifications. This could really boost your project work by allowing the attachment of documents or certain specifications with each task. This would make project overseeing easier instead of getting confused in the documentation. Read up on more monitoring tools at https://www.appoptics.com/monitor/scala-performance and get to really know your code quality.
You should also consider setting expectations for code quality well in advance. Decide beforehand which attributes are important for your project and what its requirements are. Once this is done, you should hold regular meetings and focus on a direct line of communication between yourself and your team. Everyone would hence know who is accountable for which area and the whole team’s productivity will go up as a result.