Top 5 Tips That Can Improve Software Development

The process of software development is constantly changing. It is increasingly becoming tougher to use yesterday’s approaches today to deliver tomorrow’s cutting-edge applications. Besides, every organization seeks to reduce the time it takes to reach the market in order to maintain its market share.

According to Forbes, “software development is rarely an individual endeavor; it requires collaboration to be successful.” However, very few software development teams can successfully handle an overwhelming load and deliver in tight deadlines. Unfortunately, a high turnover rate or burnout is the norm in most software development companies. It should not be the case.

This post shares actionable tips that can improve software development by optimizing the general workflow. These tips can result in a huge change for any software development team.

Deploy DevSecOps Model

The DevSecOps model integrates security practices in the DevOps software delivery model. It helps integrate security objectives very early in the software development cycle. Although security is the responsibility of everyone, DevOps teams are in a better position to apply security during development and operation.

The DevSecOps model extends the culture of shared responsibility associated with DevOps to include security measures. It helps inject security measures that help identify and solve security issues early in the life cycle of app development instead of taking such measures once the app is released.

The model helps accomplish this by allowing development teams to carry out most of the security practices independently during the software development lifecycle. It is critical in minimizing vulnerabilities that find their way to production. Hence, the model helps decrease the cost of fixing security flaws in software.

It fosters scalability and establishes a collaborative culture that makes security one of DevOps’ objectives. This way, DevSecOps focuses on building security in all stages of the delivery process, starting with the requirements phase onwards and establishing a security automation plan.

Benefits of Using the DevSecOps Model

• Improves security integration – The model decreases the time and cost of delivering secure software by eradicating the need to retrofit security measures after development.
• Faster delivery – Integrating security in the development process improves the speed of software delivery. The model helps establish and fix bugs before deployment, allowing developers to pay attention to the software features.
• Better security posture – With this model, security measures occur from the design stage onwards. Also, the shared responsibility guarantees tight integration of security from development to deployment and securing the production workload.
• Enhances the value of DevOps – To improve the general security posture through a culture of shared responsibility, this only occurs through integrating security measures into DevOps.
• Decreased costs – Establishing bugs and vulnerabilities before deployment of the software results in a huge decrease in risk and operational cost.

Keep the Codebase Extensible, Clean and Well-tested

Two key elements exist in each software development project: a software development team and a codebase. Often the software development team updates the software source code with refactored code, bug fixes and new features.

So, each code change should be clean, well-tested and easy to maintain since the codebase will ultimately affect the quality of the final software product. By adding clean code, the development team can reduce hidden bugs.

In software development, extensibility makes it possible to extend a software system to accommodate future needs. Thus, ensuring the extensibility factor of the codebase is better is without doubt good for the quality of the software. When the development teams overlook the extensibility of the source code, they may end up solving future technical limitations using tricky patches.

Besides, ensuring the codebase is well-tested helps software developers decrease surprising bugs in the end product.

Write Optimized Code

Today, writing optimized code is underrated because of the powerful hardware. It is possible to execute naive code as optimized algorithms with modern hardware. However, since all applications work with user inputs, the inputs can highlight hidden performance issues of an application whose code is not optimized.

Thus, efficiency is an essential factor when developing software. When developers write optimized code, they help ensure the efficiency factor of the software system is in a safe state. To do this, start by using the correct data types, data structures and fast algorithms for better efficiency.

Often, end-users do not own super-fast computers. Also, users run the application alongside other applications. So, software development teams should invest some time in optimizing code. They should ensure the software can use minimal resources to carry out the necessary instructions

Select Dependencies Carefully

Today, developers acknowledge that it is almost impossible to create a software system without dependencies. To create a software system without dependencies, developer teams may have to create their own operating systems.

So, they have no choice but to rely on dependencies when developing software systems. Dependencies refer to third-party libraries, services, programming language runtimes and frameworks. For instance, when developer teams create a CLI application using Python, then the Python interpreter is a dependency.

Although dependencies help developers create software by writing less code, they must choose them wisely since they affect the quality of the software product. They can increase the bundle size of an application and ultimately affect its performance. Also, dependencies can result in technical limitations. Thus, developer teams should be careful when introducing new dependencies.

Ensure Consistency for Each Component

A software system consists of several logical modules or components. These act as the building blocks of any software. Developers should ensure consistency across these logical components to deliver good quality software.

The usability of a software system decreases when each component cannot maintain the same behavior. For instance, when developing a smartphone app for inventory management, the application will have multiple data tables. What if the developer team adds a different data table for a new screen? Its users will ask for the same data table they were using.

This tip is also valid for the codebase too. Developers should maintain a coding style across the codebase when the development team consists of thousands of developers.