By It recently struck me how putting in time and effort as a development team into quality assuring our products yields numerous benefits. For one, we get to produce code that we’re proud of and so are confident to go back to for continuous improvement. We are also are not embarrassed to show it to our colleagues and even ‘the world’, thus aiding collaboration and ultimately more quality in the work produced.
Any software developer can testify (and I certainly will) of how tedious it can be to set up an already existing code base for development and get to grips with it in order to reach a point where one is confident enough to build upon it. Poor architecture, poor documentation, lack of a coherent coding standard certainly does not help in this.
In the Web Development Team we have and continue to focus much attention on ensuring the quality of the code we produce by following an agreed set of coding practices. Some of these being Test Driven Development; a consistent coding style for each product (including rules of in-code commenting); consistently updating documentation where needed (especially getting started guides); and more.
While taking these steps does take time and more effort to put into practice (especially at the beginning), the benefits are no comparison to the costs. We’ve seen these benefits through the developing of our new Programmes Plant from the ground up, which gave us a great platform to practice these good quality assuring measures.