How To Ensure Quality With Automation

Code Quality Checklist

Fig: Code Quality Checklist

How To Manage Code Quality?

Ensuring quality is important because it affects the overall condition of the software project. It is the measure of safety, security, and reliability of the code. To improve the quality of your code, one must follow certain measures such as

1. Make Use Of The Applicable Coding Standards

It is highly recommended for everyone desiring to develop a high-quality code to use coding standards. Using a coding standard makes it more readable and ensures consistency. The use of coding standards makes the code less complex and easy to benchmark. Coding standards can be documented and shared with the whole team at the start of a project.

Few coding standards used by Mindbowser are

• Limited use of globals
• Naming conventions for files, packages, local and global variables, constants, and functions
• Proper and consistent Indentation
• Error return values and exception handling conventions
• Avoid using a coding style that is too difficult to understand
• Documentation to be part of the code
• Limiting the length of functions

2. Timely Analysis Of Code

The development team needs to analyze the code at pre-decided frequencies such as at a particular day in week, at every release, at every merge or at every sprint. It helps in saving time later when errors could add up creating a spiral of dependencies. Additionally, when developers know their code will be reviewed, there is a subconscious effort to improve to make the review go smooth.

3. Following Best Practices Of Code Review

Code review should be timely and process-driven, rather than sporadic activity. Make code reviewing regular and consistent. What to review and when to review should be clear within the team and in fact code review should be taken as an opportunity for mentorship and collaboration. Expensive human review time should be spent on program logic. Parts like style, syntax, or formatting can be taken care of by automated tools like CodeGrip. More on this later.

Read More: 15 Effective Code Review Practices for Product Engineering Teams

4. Refactoring The Code

Another way of improving the code is by refactoring it. It helps in cleaning up a legacy code and reduces its complexity. That being said, refactoring changes have to be taken with caution. There should not be too much refactoring because it may lead to leaks quickly as refactored code is often reviewed with less attention. Large refactoring may lead to breaking the otherwise set patterns and standards.

Since there are a lot of loose ends that need to be managed in order to maintain quality, a process that automates the building and deployment of code can help. One of the best ways to enforce best practices, and therefore improve code quality, is by using CI/CD tools. CI/CD practice automates the code production to deployment process minimizing human error and creating a path for scalability. In this post, I’ll be covering all about

• What is CI/CD
• Implementation of CI/CD
• How to use CI/CD to improve quality

Here are the further benefits of implementing a CI/CD pipeline into a software development process.

Fig: Benefits of implementing a CI/CD pipeline

Implementation Of CI/CD

A CI/CD pipeline allows you to automate steps in your software delivery process such as initiating automatic builds and their deployment. You can use any of the services like AWS CodePipeline or Jenkins to do the same.

It is important that your CI/CD pipeline is integrated with your development process. Hence first formalize your development process and then set up pipelines accordingly.

Using containerization tools such as Docker, allows you to keep your pipeline simple and not have to install additional software on each machine.

The project should be subjected to a continuous deployment instead of deploying irregular changes controlled by the manager. The simplest way to carry out the deployment process is to deploy a staging environment and verify the working of code. Hence, rolling out the changes to the users should be done in small proportions, to prevent issues from spreading to a lot of users.

How Quality Can Be Managed Using CI/CD Automation?

CI/CD pipelines allow merging working copies of code from different developers together in a shared mainline several times throughout the day.

These pipelines form the backbone of DevOps automation. Additionally, quality assurance and security checks are integrated into the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery process by adding other tools for code review and testing. Your CI/CD pipeline becomes an integral part of your development process. It shortens the code-change-result cycle, making the code easier to fix and update as the turnaround is a lot quicker and cheaper. You can achieve a speedier build by triggering it as soon as the code is pushed to the repository.

The goal is for developers to receive immediate feedback on any issues found within their most recent code revisions. Fixes can be made at the earliest opportunity (and lowest cost). This all helps ensure the delivery of high-quality, reliable, and competitive software products on time.

Static code review tools can be part of the process to automatically test code on the predefined parameters. We use the tool CodeGrip for the same. This way a code-review is accessible by both the reviewer and reviewee.

Fig: CI/CD process with automated code review

Using automation, you can create a standard code-review template which can be followed by everyone in the team. Since there is no human intervention in the process, there is no risk of falling off the process.

Anyone adapting a CI/CD pipeline must monitor the following matrix to optimize the development environment according to the results.

1. Lead time to production
2. Number of bugs
3. Defect resolution time
4. Regression test durationBroken build time
5. Number of code branches
6. Production downtime during deployment

All the above will give you more information about the Maintainability, Reliability, and Agility of your software, allowing you to focus on improving specific areas of your pipeline.

It should be understood that logic and performance may still require a human effort. Automation can test against test cases, integrations, readability, duplication and security.

Code Quality is an important part of product development. All the more important when you have remote teams. A comprehensive code quality policy can be great savings in the long run.

Although CI/CD tools may look daunting, they are very helpful for a startup founder to have an understanding of it and have it being followed as part of your development cycle. Without a CI/CD pipeline your developers may still have to do the testing, building and deployment but it may be done manually and without a feedback loop or process.

By using the pipeline workflow, developers have greater control over the processes involved in the development process. Developers can manage changes better and quickly adjust. This leads to reduction in failures and revision times. Good development teams/agencies will always insist on having the process in place as they know that setting up a process can be helpful in catching tricky bugs and prevent undefined behavior making the codebase clean and easy to maintain with low technical debt.