Every startup that develops software needs to think about quality. While many software quality aspects only pertain to fully established companies, you need to insert quality into the organization’s mindset from the get-go, argues Martijn Rutten.
Good software quality comes in many different forms. It starts with the essentials. Make sure the product owner understands that quality isn’t for free and that quality will steal time from feature development. A strong architecture and choosing the right programming paradigm help to avoid so-called ‘accidental complexity’. And often forgotten in Agile: write good specs and test plans to capture the high-level concept before you dive into the code and lose touch with the design.
At the coding level, quality comes from consistent reviewing and preferably pair programming. Defining and adhering to good coding standards makes reviewing and refactoring far more effective in a team. Enforce the basics directly in your version management system, which can be as simple as using tabs instead of spaces to always see the nesting of conditional statements and loops. A more elaborate way is to use static code checkers (linting) to enforce that the number of violations goes down on every commit.
This article is exclusively available to premium members of Bits&Chips. Already a premium member? Please log in. Not yet a premium member? Become one for just €20 for the first year and enjoy all the benefits.
