10 Must Know Software Development Best Practices

Software is as good as its development process: find the best software development practices

Software development is a roomy topic. There is a lot to know about it. Hundreds of people disburse months and years of hard work behind creating a software system. A good software development practice goes a long way in creating a performant, intuitive, and adaptive solution. To ensure this, things like bug fixing, making a flowchart, and ensuring coherence are important.

All these best practices will help you to write better code and to avoid common mistakes. Software development practices are essential because they will help you reduce costs and increase speed. However, it will not be interesting for those who don't want to become a professional program anymore. And it won't help you even if you are programming just for fun. Without further delay, let us look at the best software development practices you can use to develop your programs.

Software Development Best Practices

The best software development practices will make your program superior. For example, with the help of software security, you can build trust and ensure that the users stay safe while using your software.

Similarly, compartmentalization, working with the right development model, etc., helps deliver great software.

1.   Fix Bugs Instead Of Hiding Them

As a software development practice, you should keep in mind to never hide your software bugs and always try to fix them. Usually, you can hide your bugs inside codebases, but bugs grow gradually and eventually. Make sure to fix them. Even though these bugs are hard to find, you can identify bugs by applying a few essential methods.

• The best way to detect software bugs is to identify them during the testing or development of the program itself.
• When implementing an algorithm, you can look carefully to find bugs to fix them.

2.   Develop Your Software Project In milestones

If you have a big project, it should be completed in small parts. Dividing the project into parts makes that work more manageable and easy to deliver. Furthermore, compartmentalization makes it easier to find bugs in the program easily.

Another advantage of this approach is that you can only build a team of software developers. After completing the work, you must compile all the tasks and code scripts to create a full-fledged application.

3.   Use the Right Software Development Process

Every software must be developed with the proper process. The best software development best practice is to divide an entire project into achievable tasks and manage them with a flow chart.

With the help of a flowchart, you can easily understand how to complete your project at every step. This is important to manage the entire Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), and it will significantly assist you and your team in meeting the expectations of your clients.

A proper strategy also determines the outcome and objective of your work. So always choose the right way to develop the software as it allows you to complete the project on time, and also integrate all the client requirements. Moreover, you can achieve the stipulated timeline with the right method. There are many types of SDLC and below mentioned are two of the best and most used ones. 

3.1.  Agile SDLC Model

Agile development was launched in 2001 and required multiple teams to work through this process. As a result, large organizations and teams prefer using this method, but smaller teams of software programmers can also use this model.

It has six parts: Analyze, Plan, Design, Develop, Deploy, and Maintenance. You can easily suitably do your project with the help of these steps.

3.2.   Waterfall Development

It is a sequential development process that helps develop the project in several parts, like a waterfall. The waterfall model includes analyzing design implementation, testing, and operation.

There is a perception that waterfall models are losing approaches. Since the creation of its structure, beginner software developers have been very attracted to it and have used this method.

4.   Write Eco-Friendly Code

You might find it strange to hear that code scripts can damage the environment. If you use more heavy codes in your project, your computer produces heat for a longer time and tries to consume more energy.

We know that most electric sources come from fuel, affecting our environment. According to research C, Rust, and C++ are the best environment-friendly languages because these languages consume significantly fewer resources. You will also be able to save the environment and save your time by using these languages.

Along with this, you will also be able to consume less physical memory. When your program consumes a lot of physical memory, it dramatically impacts your system and your device's battery. In short, use a code that saves all three of your environment, time, and storage.

However, it is also understandable that these three programming languages are not suitable for every type of project. So, a software developer might have to use other programming languages that are not as eco-friendly.

5.   Test, Test, Test

Code and software testing ensures that the solution has the best software security, can be trusted, and performs exceptionally well. It also enables you to find out whether your program is working correctly and whether it needs to be improved.

Compartmentalization is important for every development project because then software testing becomes easier. So we can get different tests done and find bugs quickly.

With powerful automated testing and analytical algorithms, we can cut short the testing time while ensuring that the testing professionals can check millions of code lines in a short-time span.

By doing more testing, you can be more confident about the function of your software. Below are some tests by which you can easily catch and fix a bug.

1.     Integration test

2.     End-to-End Test

3.     Smoke Testing

4.     Acceptance Testing

5.     Mobile Testing

6.     System testing

7.     Load Testing

6.   Coherence

Having a big team to finish a big project is essential, and it's almost impossible to nail it down without losing the structural uniformity. Code coherence is the common syntax for all employees who developed the software together.

The manager and other coders will know the author who gave this format. When the style and structure of the entire code are the same, it is called coherent code. With big projects, establishing a singular type of code structure and syntax can be difficult, and this is where code coherence proves beneficial.

The lack of coherence can easily cause confusions among the team as every software programmer might work with a different style and syntax. Ultimately, when you work to bring the code together, establishing a common standard will seem like a daunting task. These tools will help you code in the same syntax.

-  Editorconfig: Integration of code written with different IDEs

-  HTML Tidy:  Another linter for HTML also finds errors.

-  JSCS: In JavaScript, JSCS is called Javascript Style Checker. JavaScript formatting is made easy with this tool.

-  Stylelint: a CSS linter with different plugins.

7.   Code Signing Certificate

Code Signing Certificate is an excellent practice you can use as a software programmer. Software developers use it to digitally sign applications, executables, and software programs so that end users can verify that the code they receive is not tampered with or compromised.

8.   Don’t Repeat Yourself

One of the less talked about software development practices is “Don’t Repeat Yourself.” The software programmer should not repeat the code lines while developing software.

The purpose is to reduce the repetition of the software patterns. Plus, it replaces the code with abstractions and leverages data normalization to avoid redundancy.

9.    Documentation

Documentation of your codes is a love letter for you in the future. According to the Write Docs community, the code you wrote six months ago is often indistinguishable from the code that someone else wrote. If you document your code, it will also be helpful to you in the future. You will be able to revise the codes or understand them better.

10.   Being a Good Team Member

If you are working in a team, work well. Like, write your code well. You can learn all the software programs with a good team member efficiently. You get to know many people in your field by working in a team.

By understanding and meeting more people, you will be able to learn more things. You will be able to spot your missteps and improve upon them quickly. By working in a team, you will get better opportunities in the future. Working well with a team in a company also enhances your portfolio.

Conclusion

A good software programmer understands the importance of making an exemplary project flow chart to divide the work into different parts, among other aspects. Many of the practices we mentioned will be very helpful in fixing your bugs. You have to be conscious that you do not blindly follow our practices. If all the practices work well for you, then you can follow them.