10 Software Development Best Practices for Software Devs 2024

Coding programs is a tough job when your work does not meet the right standards. A software developer works on various long projects like building applications, websites, and software. The more complex the project is the more important it is for a software developer to follow certain practices to keep his code as organized and clean as possible. These practices will not only make you a good software developer but a better programmer and problem solver too.

Software Development Best Practices 

The following is the list of Top 10 software development best practices that will overall improve your code quality.

1. Design Before Coding

When it comes to software development best practices, the process starts by understanding the problem first. It’s more about problem-solving than it is about coding. Once the problem is understood, the next step is to break it down and design a solution. As a developer, it’s important to think of the solution as a purposeful design. The solutions should be designed in a way that optimally fulfills the purpose. Therefore it is crucial to take your time to design the perfect solution before diving straight into the coding process.

By designing your solution before coding, you are also identifying potential problems and thinking about the possible solutions. This leads to better code quality, reduced development time, and increased user satisfaction. Furthermore, it ensures that the whole team is on the same page, in terms of architecture, frameworks, and goals, which keeps the team together and working toward a common objective.  

2. Conduct Code Reviews

Code reviews are an important part of the development life cycle. It is the process where a developer’s code is reviewed by another developer. The reviewer checks for optimization, error-free implementation, functionality, design, and coding style of the program. The goal of it is to provide feedback that will help the developer improve the code. The reviewer and the author should set clear expectations for the review and create a checklist of items to be specifically looked at. The reviewer should provide documented feedback, complete with the comments.  

3. Look for Existing Libraries

As a developer, it’s important to be efficient and minimize the time spent on unnecessary tasks. One common mistake that developers make is to start building coding components from scratch. Though this is a fairly legal practice, it has two major drawbacks – you will encounter errors and have to fix bugs and it will take a lot of time to perfect the code. A better solution is to search for existing libraries that have codes for various components.  These libraries have thriving communities behind them, which ensures that any bugs or errors are fixed by them quickly. You can simply copy-paste the code or modify it a bit, saving you time and effort for the actual coding problems. And no, using existing code components does not make you a bad programmer. 

4. Don’t Ignore Exceptions

It’s important to always pay attention to exceptions, which are error messages that come up when you are coding. If an exception is not handled well, the program will crash. They necessarily not always show your faults but also highlight any illogical steps, that you have taken during coding. If you encounter an exception make sure to investigate. If you cannot resolve them or find out that there is no reason to resolve them, then you should document that reason. It will help the next developer or the team to understand why you took that particular approach and the logic behind it. 

5. Abstain from Using Extra Code Where it is Unnecessary

As a good practice avoid using extra code blocks or calling extra functions in advance. Doing so makes the debugging process difficult, confusing the reviewer to understand your code. This practice also saves the memory of the programming platform, such as the garbage collector, which is responsible for removing unused constants.

6. Avoid Leaving any Empty Catch Blocks

Whenever you add a catch block don’t leave it empty. A catch block is a section of code that handles exceptions, and errors, in a controlled way so that the program can continue to run. However, if a catch block is empty, the program will run, despite any errors that may occur. This is a bad practice because it will make it difficult to debug the program later on and find errors. Additionally, because there was no controlled way to handle the exception it will behave unexpectedly. So as a good practice, a developer should always write a catch block that specifies the possible error message and necessary steps to control the exception.

7. Don’t Use Mutable Objects

Another important practice is to avoid using Mutable objects in code. These are those objects whose variables can change throughout the software life cycle. This can lead to various issues like concurrent access, where two threads are competing to access a system resource at the same time. These changes make it difficult to keep track of errors in debugging, especially in complex programs. A better approach is to use immutable objects that are easy to track in case of errors. To make better use of these immutable objects, you can use the dependency injectors that allow you to add the immutable objects without hard coding them.

8. Avoid Deadlocks

Deadlock is a state where there are two threads, that depend on each other to release the system resource. Since neither of them can access the resource, the program gets stuck and can’t proceed. As a developer, it’s crucial to handle such situations effectively. The first step is to avoid creating dependencies between threads on the same resource.  You can achieve this by not using nested loops, and avoiding locking resources unnecessarily.

Another approach is to use timeouts, which allow a specific time limit for threads to access the resource, and if they fail to do so in the given time they move on.

It is essential to avoid using codes or blocks that require information from different resource systems. Such a block can cause the program to halt altogether when the thread fails to retrieve the required information. Deadlocks are hard to debug and fix, as they affect all other threads that depend on the same data.

9. Version Controls

Effective software development requires version control. When working on a project with multiple developers, each can have a version of their own, without interfering with the main file or each other’s work. This makes it easy to track changes and compare different approaches to ensure that only the best code is used. GIT is the most common version control system for this purpose. This is also useful when fixing bugs as the best solution can be identified and merged into the main file.

10. Avoiding Memory Leaks

As a developer, you should understand how memory works on your coding platform. Improper usage of memory can lead to unexpected program crashes, performance degradation, and security vulnerabilities. To prevent these issues, a feature called garbage collector can be utilized to make extra memory space. It works by removing unused constants and plays an essential role in avoiding memory leaks. It is a bug that occurs when a program allocates memory but is unable to release it when not in use. As a developer, you can always run the free() or delete(), function, depending on your language of use. This practice will keep your program execution to an optimal level. 

In Conclusion

Becoming a proficient software developer requires following certain software development best practices. These practices include avoiding certain situations like deadlocks and memory leaks. Additionally, it’s essential to know the best practices like designing before coding and conducting code reviews. Implementing these practices leads to a high-quality code, that is error-free and requires fewer turnarounds. OCloudSolutions is a software development company that follows industry best practices and delivers products and cost-effective software solution products. Our expert team of developers can create customized solutions for your next project. Fill out the form below and hire our team of developers.