By avoiding code errors you increase your efficiency and get more done in the same amount of time. We will tell you some tips to avoid coding errors.
It is impossible to avoid mistakes completely; only those who lie motionless on the couch do not make them. All programmers make mistakes, there’s nowhere to go without it. You cannot avoid mistakes when working on large projects, especially in a team. However, you can really reduce their number, so that you revise them much less often. Today we will tell you about means to avoid mistakes in program code.
Planning
At the beginning of any project you must plan everything, you should spend enough time on this process. A ship sailing aimlessly over the sea will not be guided by any wind. It is very important to make a detailed plan with step-by-step actions and criteria. It is also useful to summarize intermediate and final results.
It is not necessary to ignore the drawing of block diagrams or UML-diagrams. If you identify an error during the design, its solution will be many times cheaper than the problem that surfaced during the development or even implementation, testing. It’s much easier to rework the schema than to rewrite the code.
Testing
Apply TDD – development through testing. After the stage of creating the plan you should first engage in the development of unit tests for further code. This approach will eliminate the possibility of forgetting to do them. This, of course, is not the main thing. The key advantage of the approach is that you will be able to think through the main points of the interface for classes in advance. Most likely, the implementation will go much easier. This method helps to focus attention on the general points, without taking into account individual cases.
Besides, there is a very useful feature for those who use the Visual Studio Enterprise environment – Live Testing. It helps to see how successfully tests are completed right in the process of code development (before compilation). Additionally there is an opportunity to study the line-by-line coverage of tests and how well the work is done. Most importantly, it is all done in real time. Incredibly useful feature, I recommend it to everyone working in C#.
Crutches
Don’t bother developing your own crutches. The vast majority of frequent problems have successful solutions from other developers. It is better to find a ready-made solution which has already been tested and improved by your colleagues. There is much less risk of finding errors in such code.
It will almost certainly take you a lot of time to develop a crutch from scratch and a lot of errors will appear. Feel free to use other code fragments and additional libraries. What else can you say if reusing the same code is one of the 6 OOP paradigms.
Clean code
Create clean and understandable code right away. There is much more risk of making a mistake in bad code than in strictly structured and commented code. Extremely long description of the gist of functions is also a bad idea.
The ideal solution is a concise writing, correct variable names, informative comments. I also recommend using the SOLID, KISS, YAGNI, DRY principles. In this kind of code, a quick glance is enough to determine what is not working correctly and where you need to make some adjustments.
Documentation
You can’t forget about documentation and GIT (or another version control system). When you have access to notes and development history, it’s much easier to understand how and which piece of code should be handled. This is useful in cases where new programmers may join development.
Today you don’t even have to do everything manually, you can automate the process. It is possible to apply special comments to objects and create a relationship between tasks. You can use the TFS for this. The better the programmer’s idea of the work, the fewer errors will appear.
Improve your knowledge
A developer must constantly develop and expand his knowledge of the subtleties of working with the target language. You must understand the basic syntax errors, and modern analyzers and IDEs will help you with that. Anyway, there are non-obvious peculiarities in each language that can negatively influence the speed of an application and sometimes break its logic. You must be skillful in the tool you use. Of course, it will positively influence the quality of the code.
Code review
You should make a rule of Code Review. During a long run of some task there often appears a blurring of eyes. The effect is that you stop seeing easily noticeable errors. This is a really common condition. To avoid serious problems you should let your code be proofread by your colleagues. Reading other people’s code will help you to get useful experience and prevent you from making the same mistakes. Sharing experience is always useful.
A simple tip
Code is a creation – this is exactly how you should treat it. It is a product of work, and it has to be of high quality. I can give you one simple tip that was used on a past project – the “no-bug contest”.
All team members put some amount of money into a common piggy bank and start working. The programmer who had the least bugs in his code took all the money. A healthy competition revived the competitive spirit and gave an incentive to write better code.
I hope that the rules I listed above proved useful and interesting. Anyway, only practice will help you to make fewer mistakes. At the initial stage of work, it is all right to make mistakes. So, make it a rule not to chase the quantity, but concentrate on quality.