A code quality culture is essential to stay ahead of your competition. High code quality ensures your codebase is maintainable, scalable, and efficient. While a culture of code quality is an internal aspect of your engineering team, it directly affects your end users. High-quality code allows you to ship new features faster, improving the user experience.
CTOs and engineering managers need to establish agreed styles and standards to build a culture of code quality. They should also track high-quality issues, be awesome at code reviews, track code quality metrics, and engage in peer mentoring.
This blog post will discuss each of these core areas in detail.
1. Establish agreed styles and standards
Your team needs agreed styles and standards for documentation, code, and code comments. These standards will span simple formatting rules to the way you structure larger chunks of code.
These styles and standards will ensure that the code is consistent and readable, which minimises the risk of accidentally accumulating tech debt.
- Code Style Guides — Keep consistent by establishing conventions for things like naming, spacing and indentation. Try the Airbnb, Idiomatic, or Google style guides.
- Code Comments — Establish conventions to ensure comments are useful. Here’s a great guide. Never allow your team to push TODOs — they’re neither visible nor actionable. Use a tool to track issues linked to code from your IDE.
Having a set of agreed standards makes it easier to identify code quality issues and provide feedback during code reviews.