Evolving customer needs, changing market conditions, technological evolution, and increasing competition are compelling developers to roll out new features and software products faster than ever. Software development teams, as such, have to follow aggressive delivery schedules and deliver code faster.

As meeting deadlines becomes a top priority, the quality of code can often take a backseat. Focusing on code quality often presents itself as a luxury for fastidious programmers, an effort that seemingly slows the development process without much of an impact on user experience.

Organizations that have a limited understanding of code quality can often launch quickly and even see some short-term success. However, today development complexity is increasing with more developers working on one project. 

Software requirements also continue to evolve and practices like microservices are becoming more mainstream. Improper or bad code can make software evolution harder, more costly, and resource expensive. Plus, it becomes more time-consuming and effort-intensive for developers to unpack the technical debt and move the project along.

The Cost of Bad Code

Bad code is not just about syntax errors or small bugs. It impacts the software’s readability, functionality, maintainability, and scalability. Complicated, poorly structured, and poorly documented code can make simple solutions more complex and lead to increased dependencies.

Bad code can emerge because of poor development practices, coding inconsistencies, excessively hurried development schedules, manual issue remediation, etc. Bad code increases the technical debt, becomes a breeding ground for bugs, and makes the system prone to malfunctions and failure.

Studies place the opportunity cost of bad code at an estimated at $85 billion.  They also prove that bad code impacts developer productivity and velocity. It is estimated that the average developer spends 32 hours per month fixing errors.  41% of developer time is spent on managing technical debt. 

• Bad code stalls developer velocity as more time is spent on remediating past coding errors. Developers spend even longer fixing bad code when the errors are months and years old. The older the code, the harder it is to fix as information becomes wanting.
• Technical debt also interrupts developer velocity since they have to pause current development to fix past errors. This can potentially cause project delays and add to the development costs.  
• Bad code not only impacts errors but also affects productivity and user experience. 
• Security concerns become higher as errors create more security vulnerabilities. It also leads security teams to work on fixing low-level bugs rather than focus on security analysis to prevent errors and bigger vulnerabilities.
• Bad code also causes a lot of problems during code reuse. If a piece of bad code is used across different projects, then when it perpetuates an error, the error shows up in all the projects that it has been used in. This also increases the chances of security vulnerabilities and makes issue fixing much harder since developers often are not aware of how an entire system is organized or how one part of the system should depend on the other parts of the system.

How to Overcome Bad Code?

Code review becomes critical to ensure optimal code quality. However, as development complexity and developer shortage increase, spending time to manually fix the bad code is not only effort-intensive but not enough. Mistakes can still slip through the cracks, development velocity still gets impacted, and the cost of development and code maintenance continues to skyrocket.

Issues that are left unresolved during software development only increase over time and cause future rework to build up continuously. Research shows that:

• The code-level technical debt grows every month as new issues are added.
• The costs due to technical debt for one million lines of code can reach $1.5 million (equivalent to 27,500 developer hours) over 5 years.
• The attributed technical debt cost is $306,000 per year for a project of one million Lines of Code (LoC) and is equivalent to 5,500 developer hours spent on remediation.

Adopting effective application development and maintenance strategies becomes crucial for overcoming the bad code problem. 

Refactoring, code reviews, and adherence to coding standards also help in overcoming bad code and deliver a healthier software development environment. However, it cannot be done manually and needs tools that help in finding defects, help developers resolve bad code, and reduce their technical debt.

How Does SonarSource Clean Code Help?

Clean code is code that is consistent, intentional, adaptable, and responsible. It is formatted, idiomatic follows syntax conventions, is easily identifiable, and is written clearly to convey its purpose. To be called clean code, the code should also be segmented and organized to help developers manage and see the relationships between code and make code evolution easier.

SonarSource Clean Code helps developers clean as they code. The Clean as You Code™ methodology addresses the issues in the code that are added and changed and prevents bad code from reaching production.

• This tool frees up developer time and increases developer velocity as they no longer spend time fixing old, spaghetti code. They can instead focus on developing new features and functionalities.
• This tool allows developers to employ the Clean as You Code™ methodology that improves code quality by ensuring that all added or changed code adheres to clean code standards.
• The Clean as You Code™ methodology enables organizations to improve the overall quality of code and ensures that no new issues are introduced during code delivery. It minimizes the risks of performance issues or other bugs in the code.
• Developers also spend less time managing context switches and dedicating development cycles to cleaning, sorting, organizing, and fixing sloppy code. With this methodology, developers can shift testing left and bake security into the development process.
• The Clean Code tool does not pit developer velocity against code quality. Instead, it allows organizations to deliver quality code faster by ensuring adherence to code quality standards. 
• This tool allows developers to gradually build quality into the application under development since all new code, whether added or changed, sticks to the code quality standards, and does not introduce new issues. The codebase remediates gradually as well, and the overall application quality improves.

With SonarSource Clean Code, organizations can change almost 20% of their code each year since the Clean as You Code Quality Gate makes sure that old code is progressively remediated. This tool also alleviates legacy debt without any additional effort.

The accelerating pace of development and high-velocity expectations from development teams demand that the developers continue to deliver code even when issues arise across the codebases. SonarSource Clean Code helps developers adopt clean code practices and take proactive measures to mitigate the impact of bad code.

High code quality is a competitive advantage and is a factor in determining project success or failure, product longevity, and market success. It also influences the time-to-market. Prioritizing healthy codebases allows organizations to prioritize their customers and developers, make sure that they can leverage market opportunities, and go to market on time and with confidence. But most importantly, it ensures that development becomes cost effective and developer time is not wasted.