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5 Software Development Best Practices - Dialexa

The document outlines 5 best practices for software development projects: 1) Keep code simple, 2) Continuously test from end to end, 3) Keep code consistent across teams, 4) Conduct code reviews, and 5) Set realistic time and budget estimates. Following these practices can help projects achieve greater consistency, coherence and success.

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43 views6 pages

5 Software Development Best Practices - Dialexa

The document outlines 5 best practices for software development projects: 1) Keep code simple, 2) Continuously test from end to end, 3) Keep code consistent across teams, 4) Conduct code reviews, and 5) Set realistic time and budget estimates. Following these practices can help projects achieve greater consistency, coherence and success.

Uploaded by

Servicio al Cliente SIIT
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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2/18/22, 11:18 AM 5 Software Development Best Practices — Dialexa

5 SOFTWARE
DEVELOPMENT
BEST PRACTICES

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Presentation, Blog Post

BY EHIS OJIELU

Is there an "ideal software development project," and, if so, what are steps you
should take to achieve this ideal state? There are strict guidelines and different
software development best practices methodologies such as scrum or extreme
programming, but I have come to the realization that it's not always possible – or
wise – to strictly follow these processes.

It doesn’t imply that we don’t strive to accurately implement these methods; we just
need to stay flexible. As part of this flexibility, we should think about overall
structures that make a project successful and how consistency and coherence can
improve your odds of achieving the "ideal." Because there isn't a "playbook" on the
components of the ideal software development project, we pulled together some of
our most tried and true best practices that make software development projects at
Dialexa work better:

1. CODE SIMPLICITY

STRIVE TO KEEP YOUR CODE SIMPLE.

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Code simplicity is an idea that came from Max Kanat-Alexander, a software


developer at Google and Community Lead and Release Manager of the Bugzilla
project. The idea is to reduce unnecessary complexity in software development. The
code simplicity movement goes hand in hand with other software principles such as
DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself), introduced in the book The Pragmatic
Programmer, and YAGNI (You Aren’t Gonna Need It), a mantra in agile
development. Max has some interesting posts on this idea in his Code
Simplicity blog.

Five Best Practices for Software Development Projects from Dialexa

FIVE BEST PRACTICES FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT


PROJECTS FROM DIALEXA

2. TESTING

CONTINUOUSLY TEST FROM END TO END.


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2/18/22, 11:18 AM 5 Software Development Best Practices — Dialexa

Initially I was a skeptic of Test Driven Development (TDD) as it seemed too


prescriptive. Over time, I have realized that TDD gives you more confidence
regarding your code quality. On the other hand, Behavior Driven Development
(BDD) allows you to learn the features and requirements directly from the customer
and that alignment translates into code that is closer to the users’ needs. Full
integration testing ensures that all components are working together as expected and
increases code coverage.

3. CODE COHERENCE

KEEP IT CONSISTENT ACROSS YOUR TEAM.

When working with a team, it's important to have a consistent style guide for your
codebase. If you have a codebase where you CAN tell who wrote a particular file
then there isn’t consistency between authors. There are many tools to enforce
consistent style; here are three we like:

JSCS (Javascript Style Checker) is a JavaScript linter which also has a great
formatter.
ESLint is an extremely configurable linter and has gained a lot of popularity in
the community.
Editorconfig is a tool to enable consistency between the many editors and
IDE’s that your developers use.

4. CODE REVIEWS

DON’T BE SHY, ALLOW SOMEONE TO CHECK YOUR CODE!

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Everyone makes mistakes. An attitude which allows you to acknowledge


imperfections is the first step to investing your trust in a code review. Having a
colleague read over your pull requests before merging is a good way to ensure final
code quality. Code reviews help reduce bugs in the product – that's the bottom line -
so give up that idea of perfection. “The Code Review Mindset" is a great article on
the importance of code reviews.

Find out where great products come from with our End-to-End Product
Development Guide.

5. ESTIMATION

SET YOUR TIME AND BUDGET ESTIMATES REALISTICALLY.

A realistic budget keeps your software project from feeling too much pressure.
With agile methods, this enables the scope to flex more easily as the project
progresses, but an estimate that is truly off can cause problems in quality, morale
and output. Estimation can be quite tricky – as it's hard to find a happy balance
between being realistic and sandbagging when there are so many unknowns. Rest
assured, better estimation comes with experience, and there are many tools available
to assist with software development project coding estimates. Here is a good list to
start.

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CONCLUSION

In reality, the “ideal software development project” may never exist! Each project
has its own characteristics, flaws, joys, sorrows, dreams, features, users, bugs,
codebases, test cases and many other components. Hopefully these concepts make
your projects more consistent and coherent. When in doubt, share your knowledge,
encourage trust among your development team, stay positive, and remember - you
will ship!

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