Elevate your software developer career from good to pro- best software engineering practices and principles you should know
In this article, I am going to discuss some major principles, guidelines, and practices related to software development.
First, we will talk about some principles.
SOLID Principle
SOLID is a very commonly used popular set of principles for object-oriented software designing. SOLID is an acronym that stands for 5 key principles that should be followed when designing OO design. This concept was developed by Robert C Martin (also known as Uncle Bob) in 2000.
A successful software always changes and develops by many developers, and it may become increasingly complex leading to rigid, immobile, and enigmatic software. SOLID principles were developed to oppose those design problems and make the software design more feasible, maintainable, and extendable.
· S- Single responsibility
· O- Open/ close
· L- Liskov substitution
· I- Interface segregation
· D- Dependency inversion
Single responsibility principle
Robert Martin recapitulated this principle as,
“A class should have one, and only one, reason to change, meaning that a class should have only one job.”
More elementarily, this can be described as a class should solve only one problem. This principle can be applied not only for classes but also for functions, modules, software components, APIs, and microservices.
Following the single responsibility principle is important because different teams work on the same project and if a class does more than one job, they may edit the same class over and over for different reasons, leading to incompatible modules. This principle helps to reduce merge conflicts and makes version control much easier.
Open/close principle
When you need to add new functionality to an existing class, that well-tested class needs to be modified and that invents a possibility of bugs in that class.
This principle states that “Objects or entities should be open for extension, but closed for modification”
Extension means adding new behavior to a class and modification means changing the code of an existing class.
Robert Martin summarized that we should be able to add new functionality/behavior to the class without modifying it. This can be achieved with the help of interfaces and abstract classes.
It is very important to follow this principle to produce a more reliable and maintainable software product.
Liskov principle
This principle is named for Barbara Liskov, who introduced this concept of behavioral subtyping in 1987.
This states that “Every subclass/derived class should be able to substitute their parent/base class”.
This principle may be the most difficult principle of SOLID to understand, but in many ways, this can be simply considered as an extension of the open-close principle, since this ensures that derived/subclasses extend the base class without changing its behavior.
This principle promotes avoiding conflicts during updates and extensions of the software design.
Interface Segregation principle
Martin elucidates this principle by advising,
“Make fine-grained interfaces that are client-specific. Clients should not be forced to implement interfaces they do not use.”
Software developers should not add new methods to existing interfaces. Instead, they should create new interfaces for different behaviors and let the classes implement multiple interfaces as needed.
More generally this principle states that many client-specific interfaces are better than one general-purpose large interface. It avoids conflicts of implementing and updating the software design.
Dependency inversion principle
This principle is also very related to the open/close principle.
Martin explains this principle as “high-level modules should not depend upon low-level modules. Both should depend on abstractions.” Further, “abstractions should not depend on details. Details should depend upon abstractions.”
The dependency inversion principle is a way of decoupling software modules to make them more flexible, agile, and reusable.
Implementing SOLID design principles during software development will produce good code that meets the industry standards, and it is essential to practice those principles to become a pro software developer.
Let’s discuss some guidelines that help to become a pro software developer.
Approaching the solution
A good software product provides a better technical solution for a business problem. To become a good developer, you must try to find the best solution for the problem. This doesn’t mean that you should always know the solution to every problem. But you need to achieve the solution by following the “approaching solution guidelines.”
Before planning on the solution, thinking through the problem is necessary. Understanding the problem completely without any unclear parts will pave the way to approach a better and validated solution that satisfies all the requirements.
The divide and conquer method is a good approach for the solution. Dividing the main problem into smaller, manageable subproblems helps to understand the problem more conveniently and it leads to more reliable solutions.
Overthinking is major issue developers tend to face when approaching a solution for a problem. You need to keep the solution simple (KISS method — keep it simple and stupid) so that it would make the outcome more user-friendly.
Learning from mistakes is important. Even the senior developers make mistakes when they design solutions. You always need to anticipate mistakes and changes and evolve continuously.
“It’s okay to make mistakes. Mistakes are our teachers — they help us to learn.” — John Bradshaw
Another very important guideline is you always need to remember ‘why this software exists’. If you forget about the bigger picture of the problem and the solution product, you may end up on a wrong path.
The software product you produce as the solution should always be user-friendly because it is used by non-technical people. Even though you come up with a better solution, it doesn’t matter if the user can’t understand and interact with it properly.
Following those guidelines, it will make much easier to become a pro developer.
Implementing the solution
There are several guidelines you can follow when implementing a solution to a business problem. Let’s discuss some of them.
YAGNI
YAGNI stands for ‘You Aren’t Gonna Need It’. It is a very popular quote from Extreme Programming (XP). This focuses on removing unnecessary functionalities and logic from the product. Don’t code something that is not needed today even though you think it will need in the future. It is waste of time, and it complexes the solution.
DRY
DRY stands for ‘Don’t repeat yourself’. This aims to reduce the repetition of information in the code and try to reuse codes as much as possible. It is very good if every piece of information has a single representation within the solution. To achieve this, you can divide the problem into smaller subproblems and generate reusable pieces as much as possible. It will save your time as well as the others.
DRITW
This stands for ‘Don’t Reinvent The Wheel.’ Most probably someone has already solved the problem. Don’t hesitate to use that solution in your product. It is totally fine. For example, you can use design patterns to solve many similar problems.
Another very important guideline when implementing a solution is to make the code more readable. Better to comment on the code properly since when another developer or tester views your code, it is much easier for them to understand the logic behind the code.
Following those guidelines will help you to become a great and well-reputed developer among the others.
Let’s discuss best practices you should follow.
Practices refer to a set of guidelines that help to develop a quality software product. Here let’s discuss some practices that are considered as best practices in the industry.
Unit testing
Unit testing involves testing individual components of the software program. The main purpose behind this is to check that all the individual parts are working as expected. A unit could be a class, function, API or module, etc.
Unit testing helps to improve the code quality. It detects bugs at the early stage and saves a lot of time and money and reduces complexity. This acts as a verification to the developers. If there’s a bug in the code, you can easily detect that and update the code accordingly and move forward with the development confidently.
Code quality
Maintaining code quality is important because it impacts the overall software quality as well as the security and reliability of the software. Your code should not only be working and give the expected output, but also it should be easily readable and understandable. You can check your code quality using different tools and techniques. A great developer codes according to the engineering, language, and domain best practices.
Code review
code review also known as a peer code review involves one or more team members checking another team member’s work. Good code reviews look at the change itself and how it fits into the codebase. They cover the correctness of the code, test coverage, functionality changes, and confirm that they follow the coding guides and best practices. They will point out obvious improvements, such as hard-to-understand code, unclear names, commented-out code, untested code, or unhandled edge cases. This is one of the best ways to improve code quality.
Version controlling
Version controlling refers to tracking all changes and synchronizing them with a master file stored on a remote server. Version controlling is vital when it comes to software development. Developers can work independently and add, remove features or make changes to a single project, without impacting others’ work. If a serious bug is created version controlling provides the feature to return to the previous stable codebase. To become a pro-level developer, it is really important to use version control when you are working on a project.
Continuous integration
In software engineering, continuous integration is the practice of merging all developers’ working copies to shared mainline several times a day. Grady Booch first proposed the term CI in his 1991 method, although he did not advocate integrating several times a day. Wikipedia
This allows developers to identify defects early and fix them easily.
Conclusion
In this article, you were presented with best practices, guidelines, and principles that you need to know when going forward in your software development career.
