During my career, I have encountered projects that were well written and those that were not. Often times, the poorly written projects were farmed out to development firms in under-developed parts of the world such as India or Pakistan. What is it that makes code poorly written? For me, the most important aspect of well written code is maintainability. No other metric is as easily correlated to long-term revenue and cost as maintainability. Code written today should be able to be quickly modified in the future when bugs are found, when requirements change, or when new features are desired. How can this be accomplished? First, projects need to be logically laid out. Code packaging schemes are necessary to easily navigate large projects. Throwing everything in a single folder will ensure that future developers have a more difficult time finding code they are looking for. Second, files and classes must be named logically — otherwise, every file becomes ‘mystery meat’ that is only identifiable when it’s opened. Third, classes should broken up appropriately. I have worked with projects were there was only a single data access object for the entire schema. Monolithic files such as this are substantially more difficult to navigate, and they can also cause problems with source control if multiple developers are trying to edit different parts of the file. Fourth, consistent style should be followed and whitespace should be cleaned up. Following code with different styles, or with 10 lines of whitespace in the middle is more difficult. Imaging reading a paragraph in a book where the author decided to add 10 extra blank lines — code is no different, it is intended to be read. Fifth, properly breaking out functions is imperative. Too often I have seen code were, for example, the code to send an email was entirely replicated over and over again instead of placed in a single function. When email standards change (for example, changes to security) or when the tools you use to send email change (such as switching from SMTP to a REST based service such as MailGun), you can be sure that the time taken with a poorly engineered codebase will be longer and that you are more likely to have a greater number of bugs. These are some of the biggest issues I typically encounter in project after project and they cause a significant problem to businesses. Unfortunately, the customer is often unaware of how poorly the code is written. When they hire someone else to maintain the code, they wonder why it takes so long to update or why there are so many bugs. They falsely believe the new developer is less competent and attribute the problems to him or her. Long term, time-to-market suffers, customer confidence is diminished from bugs, and business opportunities are missed because of wasted time. When you hire developers — particularly when they are outsourced — it is imperative to ensure that they are writing good code. Ask to see code samples before hiring, perform frequent code-reviews with them, and specify coding standards they must follow. If you don’t, the money you save by using offshore resources will be lost during the course of maintaining the application.
