During your next project in which you will be creating a mobile application, currently on the market you can choose from several of the most popular programming languages such as React Native, Flutter, Kotlin, Swift or Java. However, each of these languages has one thing in common – code quality.
Quality of code when using the app
When using the mobile application itself, it is difficult to determine whether the code is good or bad, as it is necessary to look at the code itself and have programming knowledge in order to understand the quality of the code. However, when using the app itself, there are a number of factors that can help us determine whether the app is well-written and has high-quality source code.
Speed of the mobile application
When using a new web app, mobile app or website for the first time, it is worth paying attention to the speed and smoothness of the application. If you notice performance problems already at the initial stage of using the application, it may be certain that in the future, when the application will be used by many more users and there will be more and more functions in it, even greater problems will appear. Application performance that is too slow and lacks smoothness can be caused by poor quality code that is not efficient and optimal.
No errors in the code
The final version of an app or website that goes to you before release should not contain any bugs. Bugs should be caught and fixed during the first versions of the application and tests run. If you find bugs while using the application, it may also indicate poor quality code and underdevelopment of all elements of the application’s source code.
What is code quality?
Good quality, clean code is an effective way to save time and collaborate with other developers. Unfortunately, the quality of the code is not something that can be easily assessed, e.g. on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of certain guidelines, but there are a few important elements that make up good quality mobile app source code.
Readability:
The code written must be readable and understandable to other programmers. This is necessary in order to be able to work freely with the code, so that every programmer knows what a piece of code is responsible for. The readability of the code has a positive effect on the time it takes for new employees responsible for the application to be introduced into the company, for the code to be analysed, for new features to be implemented and for any errors in the code to be quickly verified.
Scalability:
Good quality code that is written in an understandable way is a very good foundation for an application that can be scaled, modified and new features implemented in the future.
Testing:
Writing code in a way that is readable and is keeping with the latest programming practices will make it much easier to test the entire application or website. You will be able to easily write unit tests that will help detect errors.
Reliability:
It may be obvious that all code should be reliable while unfortunately this is not always the case. Quality good code will be reliable and will work well for many years. The code will work the way it is supposed to and during testing you will be confident that everything works as intended. When implementing new features into your application, you will be confident that they will not have a negative impact on other parts of the code, and even if they do, you will be able to easily locate the problem because moving around and reading good quality code does not cause much of a problem.
Security:
Every code should be well written to include the latest and best security practices. Good quality code will be secure and less vulnerable to hacking attacks and programming errors.
Performance:
Quality code that is written optimally will make our application run faster and consume fewer resources. This leads to greater customer satisfaction, as we know that everyone appreciates fast and smooth application performance.
Why is good documentation important in software development?
Source code documentation is as important as the quality of the code itself. It is very important for maintaining and developing a project. Good quality documentation should include information such as the functionality of the code and how the application works, as well as the individual components and connections between them. Documentation is a very important part of the development and design process, as developers can easily and quickly learn and understand how the code works. It is important to remember to keep the documentation up to date when implementing new functionalities in the application.
Good quality code is an investment for years
It often happens that a client asks for a cost estimate for his project from several companies in order to compare prices for the service of application development. This is, of course, fully understandable, but the problem may appear when the price is the only criteria for choosing a software company performing the project without paying attention to other factors. A customer focused only on price may not pay attention to additional procedures that the company offers during the development of the application, such as documentation, automated testing or code review.
What is the business budget impact of low code quality?
Unfortunately, there may be a situation in which a client wants to save money on the programmers responsible for writing the application and will not pay attention to the quality of the code. Of course, such an application or website may work smoothly, but it may happen that after some time it will function worse and worse, load longer and longer, and customer dissatisfaction will grow. In such a case, the owner of the application will have to focus more on making sure his product is written in a professional manner – good quality and clean code. Unfortunately, in such a case it will be much more costly for the customer than paying more for the application during its development. In the situation when the application will not have good quality code we will have two choices to improve its performance.
Creating a new application
A possible scenario is that the application will have to be written from scratch. In this case, the development company will be able to ensure that the new code is good quality from the start. Unfortunately, the cost and investment in the previous version will be lost because it will no longer be used. Costs will have to cover the development of the new application and the maintenance of the previous one because no one wants to suddenly leave their customers with a non-functioning application.
Fixing the app
The second scenario is to fix the current application however the costs will also be very high. You have to go through the current code line by line looking for problems and places to optimize the code. The application cannot be disabled because this would be viewed negatively by customers. The analysis of the code itself and the implementation of unit tests to make the corrections work well will certainly be costly and time-consuming. When we work on an active application, we must be sure that the implemented changes will not negatively affect the functioning of any of its elements.
Good quality code – summary
I hope you learned more about the quality of the code and how it affects the application. No one wants to use an application that loads slowly, freezes, or sometimes just shuts down. This is why it’s a good idea to look into the services offered by the particular software company you’d like to start working with. As I wrote above good quality code with documentation is a very important investment in an application that prevents future code problems and additional costs.
At NEATSoft, we create good quality code for each of our mobile applications according to the standards for writing clean code.
