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5 Clean Code Practices for Every Software Project
Ideas to improve the quality of your frontend, backend, CLI, desktop, or mobile app codebase
Programmers usually work with various sorts of software codebases, and they often add, edit, and remove code lines. Programming is a collaborative approach most of the time. A particular software development team’s highly experienced programmers known as architects typically create the initial foundation of the project. In other words, they prepare the design documents of the conceptual software system. Besides, they define coding standards and architectural standards. After that, other developers start developing each component with the help of the architecture design documents.
Almost all real-world software systems need rapid-feature implementations. Therefore, programmers always try to make their codebases clean and well-organized, then other programmers can easily implement new features. Further, new programmers can start working with the particular software system quickly.
Therefore, we should always think about maintainability factors before applying any code modification to the codebase. I worked with many closed source software projects and open source software projects. I always try to write clean code with the following practices. You may rethink your coding practices after checking these.
Use Self-Explanatory Names All The Time
Any programming language has several predefined keywords that we cannot use in custom namings. For example, The C programming language has 32 special keywords such as if, for, return, etc. Software libraries and frameworks follow different naming conventions. For example, The C programming language’s standard library has functions such asprintf, sprintf, etc. Programmers have the freedom to choose any name they wish for source code elements except the specific programming language’s keywords and library APIs.
Programmers should always try to select meaningful and self-explanatory naming for source code elements. It’s not only about variable names. We need to choose better names for classes, namespaces, custom data types, functions, and even file names. If there is no clear naming for these source code…
