The IT industry is built on strict rules: specific software development methods exist so that specialists can do their job clearly and efficiently. Each company chooses its way and pace of development. Someone uses DevOps outsourcing services to organize the team's work; someone copes with self-management. However, there is always one main link in this process: you must get the maximum result for the declared budget.

Of course, despite all the efforts, it is not always possible to follow the chosen strategy, even if you have well-established processes and carefully selected specialists.

TechCrunch points out that the defining factor for a good developer and the actions that can improve your programming skills is how well he can learn new practices. That's why today, we're going to look at five best practices that make a project successful.

Why is it important to consider new software development practices?

Most software developers will agree that most of the working time, every programmer reads code, not writes it. Of course, for your code to be easy for others to understand, you need to be able to make it clean and crisp.

It is why the IT community often seeks to create standardized coding conventions. And it helps keep the code up to date and valuable to customers, future developers, and programmers.

Best Software Development Practices

1. Write readable code

In words, everything sounds simple: write code that others understand. However, in reality, writing 200 lines of code that another software engineer can immediately understand is much more difficult.

Forbes came up with a funny solution to this problem: imagine yourself in the place of the programmer who will clean up your code after you. Nevertheless, this wish is quite true – when you have to read someone else's code that is written well, you will understand what happiness it is.

2. Maintain Code Version Control

Having a code version control system allows you to have more productive code and quickly find out where and when code changes were made. Plus, code version control has its advantages:

• protects the system from failures
• makes the code available to the whole team
• allows parallel development
• allows you to revert to a previous version

3. Refactor your code

Refactoring is about improving your code's structure without changing its functionality. You can turn them into a single function when you have multiple code snippets that do similar things. This action simplifies the code as a whole.

To create a quality program, you need to spend time refactoring the code. Thus, refactoring makes it possible to solve problems faster and develop a product more smoothly.

4. Create your coding style

The main thing in this style: is the way you think. It certainly comes with experience. Experienced programmers don't release unstructured code blocks to get it done quickly. They create code that is as clear as possible to other developers, no matter how long it takes to write it.

5. Always estimate task time

Correctly estimating the time it will take you to write code will keep your software project from getting overloaded. Agile methods make it easy to change the scope of work as the project progresses, but the wrong estimate can lead to problems with quality, morale, and results. Evaluation can be challenging, as it's hard to strike the right balance between realism and sand mixing when so many unknowns exist. But this comes with experience.

Conclusion

If you ask an experienced developer what the best practices for software engineering at the moment are, he can name a few of his secrets. But he will always describe the points we named above in this article. All because they help to achieve the goal – to create a quality product on time and without inflated budgets.

We know everything about how much it costs to develop a website. Because in our team, we also adhere to the most effective principles and practices that help satisfy both the client and the developers. And we are happy to share these secrets with you. Don't wait for a specific moment or a bad experience; start writing good code now!

Author's bio: Anastasiia Lastovetska is a technology writer at MLSDev, a software development company that builds web & mobile app solutions from scratch. She researches the area of technology to create great content about app development, UX/UI design, tech & business consulting.