Software Development is an incredibly complex process. It is also a continuous process and keeps going on till the particular software’s support is stopped or it is completely replaced by a newer and better software. Hence, the inefficient code that you write today, might come back to haunt you several years from now. Therefore, it is always important to know and use the best practices that have been established for writing efficient code. Let us now take a look at the 4 Best Practices for Efficient Software Development.

Naming Your Variables and Functions Sensibly:

Giving your variables and functions a nice descriptive name can be the single biggest favor you can do to your future self or your colleagues who might have to work with your code later. Looking at a function called ‘functionOne’, you would not be able to understand what that function does when it gets called. You will have to go inside and read the code to understand its purpose. However, if you see a function called ‘convertDecimalToHexadecimal’, you can be pretty sure without looking at the function’s code that it is used to convert Decimal numbers to their Hexadecimal equivalents.

Commenting:

Often, a particular line or block of code’s function might not be obvious at first glance. It might be ambiguous and get clear only in the context of a larger block of code or a different class. Hence, when you or someone takes a look at your code in the future, it may be incredibly time-consuming to exactly understand the purpose of certain lines or block of code. Hence, to make things simpler and save your future self a lot of valuable time, it is always a good idea to include comments explaining exactly what that line or block of code does.

Indentation:

Giving your code blocks proper indentation is a very important aspect of writing good code. If you don’t indent your blocks of code properly, your future self or a colleague will have an extremely hard time figuring out which bracket closes which block of code and trivial things like that. Some programming languages like Python make this a must and incredibly improve the readability of code.

Using Version Control:

Some software take years to develop and often when you go and look back at a piece of code, it can be difficult to understand how we arrived at a certain stage. Using version control software like Git can help us better understand the development logic and steps. It can also help us get back to a safe point in case we mess things up.