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While the impact of poor-quality code may not always be immediately visible in the final product, it usually manifests at some point in the future. This is often in the form of technical debt, where software teams waste time refactoring bad code, an issue that could have been avoided if better practices had been implemented from the start.
As a developer, you’ve probably faced at least one or two tight deadlines that seemed impossible to meet. In the rush to deliver on time, it's easy to push writing clean, well-structured code down your priority list in favor of simply getting a functional project out the door. However, poor-quality code can have severe implications in the long run.
Let's explore the importance of good code quality and how it can affect an application's overall security.
What is Poor Code Quality?
While there is no set definition of poor-quality code, you can gauge the quality of a piece of code based on how easily it can be read, maintained, and extended. Here are some characteristics of poor-quality code:
- Lack of readability: Code that's hard to understand, with unclear variable names, complex logic, or inconsistent formatting, making it difficult for other developers (or even the original author) to comprehend what the code does.
- Duplication: When the same logic or code appears multiple times in different places, it increases the chances of errors and makes the code harder to maintain.
- Poor structure: Code that’s disorganized or not modular, where different parts of the program are tightly coupled, making it harder to test, debug, or modify individual components without affecting the entire system.
- Lack of documentation: Not providing comments or clear documentation on what the code does, why it was implemented a certain way, or how it should be used can lead to confusion for others who need to work with it in the future.
- Overcomplexity: Writing overly complicated solutions for simple problems can make the code harder to maintain, understand, or modify. Simplicity is often a sign of quality.
- Inconsistent naming conventions: Using inconsistent or unclear naming conventions for variables, functions, or classes can make it hard to follow the code's intent.
- Hard-coded values: When values are directly written into the code (instead of being parameterized or configurable), it can cause issues when changes are needed or when the code is reused in different contexts.
- Poor testing: Lack of unit tests or improper testing can lead to undetected bugs, making it difficult to ensure the code works as expected over time, especially when changes are made.
- Scalability issues: Code that doesn’t consider performance or scalability can cause problems as the application grows, such as slow response times, memory leaks, or crashes under heavy load.
- Excessive dependencies: Over-reliance on external libraries or complex frameworks without clear justification can make the codebase fragile and harder to maintain.
These issues create long-term technical debt, where more time and resources are spent fixing problems rather than developing new features or improving the product.
The Relationship Between Code Quality and Security
Aside from being easy to read and maintain, a clean, well-organized code is also a good indicator of high security. Code quality deeply impacts application security because code design directly influences how secure an application is.
For instance, let’s say you’re in a rush to meet your deadline. As a result, you look for shortcuts that allow you to deliver in time but sacrifice code quality in the process. While the software might work as intended, there’s a greater chance that it contains vulnerabilities and exploitable loopholes.
Moreover, the lack of code organization and poor architecture makes it more difficult to implement and enforce security best practices. In a disorganized codebase, it can be hard to implement consistent security measures across the entire application, making it easier for vulnerabilities to creep in unnoticed.
High-quality code makes it easier to identify and address security flaws early, ensuring that the application is more resilient to attacks and safer for users.
Factors Responsible For Poor Quality Code
Poor-quality code is a huge problem among software teams. However, this issue can be resolved by implementing the right processes and practices. Here are some factors responsible for poor quality and how to rectify them.
Lack of Security Culture
Writing high-quality code should be a priority within software teams. If the team isn’t mandated to follow coding guidelines and best practices, developers might skip important practices and mess up the codebase.
Coding standards must not only be clearly defined and communicated, but they must also be enforced, whether by human review or through the use of automated code review tools.
Additionally, in an environment where the focus is solely on meeting deadlines or shipping features quickly, developers may feel pressured to prioritize speedy delivery over writing clean and secure code. This can be avoided by setting realistic deadlines and fostering good communication among all stakeholders.
Lack of Automated Code Reviews
Humans are not infallible; even developers with decades of experience make mistakes. Automated checks ensure that the code produced by the software team is high-quality, and code review tools do so way more efficiently than any human developer.
Codacy, for example, can scan all your repositories automatically and categorize issues found based on issue type, severity level, code author, etc. It presents all these security risks in a centralized dashboard, giving software teams an overview of code health.
Codacy enables teams to enforce automated checks on a pull-request level, allowing developers to catch issues before code merges.
There are also IDE extensions that let you integrate code analysis directly into your IDE environment. This is available for both Visual Studio Code (VSCode) and Intellij IDEA.
If you’re building anything serious that you intend to ship to real users, you should incorporate automated testing into your development process. Beyond keeping your code clean and secure, it also helps developers save precious time that could’ve been spent on code reviews.
Failure to Adapt to New Tools and Practices
The software development landscape evolves rapidly. Every year, we witness new technologies, programming languages, methodologies, and application security tools coming into use. Similarly, there are also dozens of new threats to worry about.
This constant change means software teams must be up-to-date with current developments and trends, and should also be willing to try new methods. Resource has to go into educating the team about good security practices, new testing techniques, and tools for streamlining application security.
This proactive approach ensures that the company stays one step ahead of emerging threats.
Using a Poor Design at the Start
Starting with a poor design or architecture sets the foundation for poor-quality code. It can lead to tightly coupled components, making the code brittle and difficult to extend, while also increasing complexity and redundancy.
This results in a codebase that's hard to maintain, scale, or extend, and over time, it leads to technical debt that becomes costly to fix. In short, bad architectural choices from the outset create a fragile system prone to bugs and performance issues.
How To Prevent Low Quality in Code and Improve It
Code quality is not an afterthought but a necessity. The benefits of clean, well-structured code are enormous and positively affect the overall security of the application. Here are some practices for preventing poor quality code or improving it.
Maintain a Consistent Coding Standard
Maintaining a consistent coding standard is one of the most effective ways to improve code quality. Coding standards facilitate easier collaboration between developers, as everyone speaks the same "language" in style and structure.
This consistency allows team members to understand and contribute to each other’s code. For new team members, standardized code is easier to learn and get up to speed with, improving their onboarding experience and reducing the time it takes for them to contribute effectively.
Maintaining a consistent coding standard is also essential for long-term maintainability. A consistent structure ensures that future developers (or even the original developers returning to the project after some time) can quickly understand how to navigate and modify the code. This is especially important when multiple developers work on different parts of the codebase or when the codebase is continuously evolving.
Implement Code Review and Automated Checks
One of the most immediate benefits of code reviews is the ability to catch bugs early in the development process. During code reviews, other developers will scrutinize the code to look for mistakes the original author may have missed.
Automated tools should be used to analyse the code for improved accuracy and efficiency. Implement static code analysis to identify potential vulnerabilities, errors, and deviations from coding standards early in the development process. Also, enforce checks at the pull request level to catch issues before code merges.
Refactor Legacy Code When Necessary
Over time, legacy code can become outdated, hard to modify, or filled with technical debt. Refactoring helps to simplify complex or inefficient parts, remove redundancies, improve performance, and ensure that the code adheres to modern best practices.
By refactoring the code, teams can also identify areas where performance can be improved, such as optimizing algorithms, reducing unnecessary database queries, or simplifying complex logic. These improvements can lead to faster execution times, reduced resource consumption, and better scalability as the application grows.
Improve Code Quality With Codacy
Codacy offers powerful features that enable teams to write better code, all wrapped into an accessible user interface dashboard. You get all the important code quality metrics (issues, complexity, duplication, and coverage) in one place.
Codacy Quality automatically analyzes each commit and pull request as soon as it's made. It delivers instant feedback on code quality directly within your Git provider (GitHub, Bitbucket, or GitLab), highlighting issues inline, offering one-click commit suggestions, and preventing problematic merges.
Ready to write high-quality, error-free, and secure code? Sign up for Codacy for free today!
