Software Quality: The Developer’s Perspective

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Quality control is very crucial for any product; A prospective client always want at its best.

If you love coffee, then you would measure its quality by its taste, texture and aroma; how often could someones taste end-up being your match, over a cup of coffee… ;p

Quantifying the quality, based on the factors like taste, texture and aroma sounds simple; a manual task that one can use to measure quality to analyze a cup of coffee, while considering a complex commercial software, a manual software quality review is risky and almost a myth.

The true nightmare for a programmer, is to analyze and refactor codes written by other programmers…! No matter how boring it sounds, this phase will always shows up at some point of time.

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Jeopardy of deadlines, makes most of the developers end-up in compromising with code quality, and later realizes the mistake...!

It is well known that a small wrong code is always a reason behind every tragic pitfall.

Code quality analysis is an iterative task, we should consider factors like complexity, maintainability, duplication, bad codes and many more while quantifying the quality of software.

It may sound complicated, but accessing the software quality is no rocket science, all you need is a right tool and the best of all is, automation is a gift to every developer and you can have it…!

The development environment can be configured in such a way that, every solution pushed into respective remote branches can trigger a code analyzer, which reviews the updates in background and convey a detailed report on the possible improvements.

SonarQube is one such tool, that is made available as an opensource platform, supporting various programming languages, that comes handy by automating inspection of code quality, code reviews by static analysis of code, to detect bugs, code smells, and security vulnerabilities…

SonarCloud, on the other hand provides a remote platform, so no efforts required to install and configure the environment, one can directly perform a quality audit on any publicly hosted project in GitHub, the best of all is you can give it a try free of cost…! Although the first run could take up more time, a quality assurance report is always worthy, that can boost your confidence on every builds.

With an elaborated reporting across various sections; dashboard will give a quick view on overall review made, under four main categories, like:

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

1. Reliability: A review on possibly encountered bugs, rating is given in scale between A to E, indicating bug free code to bug-full code. Software complexity is one of the factor that directly affects the reliability metrics.
2. Security: A review on vulnerabilities that might have encountered during the audit, this is also rated in a scale between A to E.
3. Maintainability: Indicated how easy it is to understand the software codes, this will include other contributing factors like Code Smell (bad code that could cause damage in future), Debt (effort required to fix code smell)…
4. Duplication: Code Patterns that are written repeatedly, most of the copy past work leads to code duplication, which affects the maintainability… 

more on quality metrics.

Being a enthusiastic developer one should always follow the best practices, a few like:

1. Using design patterns, to solve repeated problems, this can contribute in delivering a reliable solution
2. Designing generic solutions, that can solve related problems, which will help enormously in reducing the code base and helps for maintenance.
3. Using test driven development, is most common these days, in making sure the unit code block is secure and self sustainable. Be generous while writing unit test cases.
4. Modular decomposition is the best approach in longer run, reduces the complexity makes easy to understand and it also contribute for the overall performance.

Do remember, it is worst if Quality Analysis is not used in your projects development environment, instead of having it outside of the environment, its always best to make a part of it. No matter the size of project, have a Software quality management audit for all updates you make, this will for sure be a contributing factor, for giving out a quality software, with a reliable build.

Found in Medium