Thriving in today’s agile world requires maintainable, robust, verifiable, and readable codes. With the ever increasing customer demand for faster delivery and shrinking projects’ budgets, writing quality code has become more daunting. If you want to set yourself up for success you need to adhere to the best coding practises which save you time, resources and headaches of course.
Stick to the language style guide:
It’s basic but very important. Every language has a style guide which provides you with all the necessary details on how to use indentations, space, braces and more. If you are planning to modify the style to meet your specific requirements, make sure everything is well thought out and everyone in your team knows the customization.
Make it Simple:
Always think of the simplest solution and make your code less complicated and clumsy. Sometimes it’s better not to code at all! Always ask yourself this simple question “has anybody else coded a similar solution?” if yes, don’t reinvent the wheel.
Always comment and document:
When it comes to coding best practices, commenting and documenting are as important as writing a clean code. First of all, well commented functions are helpful to other programmers to understand the code better when you’re working in a team. It also helps you if you want to edit your code later and remember the logic you have used.
In addition to any comments, use a short readme file which explains the purpose of your code as a whole. It should contain instructions on building, installing and using your code.
Test your code and fix any errors:
It doesn’t matter how clean and quick you can write lines of code or how optimized it is if it doesn’t work properly. There’s nothing worse than getting everything to work locally and then making the website live and nothing works like it should. It’s always easier and more efficient to trace a bug when you’re working on a specific chunk of code than to look through the whole application later on. Testing your code may speed you down, but if you don’t test or ignore the problem, it doesn’t go away. So it’s much better to fix it while you are at it.