Good Code Characteristics and How to Achieve High‑Quality Software

The author introduces the book “The Art of Code: Driving Software Development with Engineering Thinking” and offers two copies as a giveaway for readers who like and comment.

Good code is defined by ten characteristics: robustness, efficiency, maintainability and simplicity, brevity, testability, reusability, portability, observability/monitorability, operational readiness, and scalability/extensibility. These are grouped into four categories (see Table 1).

Examples of bad code are presented, illustrating problems such as poor function and variable names, lack of comments, functions without a single purpose, bad layout, and code that is difficult to test.

The article explains that high‑quality code results from a complete development lifecycle, not just writing code. It emphasizes the importance of upfront activities such as requirement analysis and system design, writing unit tests during coding, and post‑coding activities like integration testing, deployment, and monitoring.

Investing more effort in the early phases of analysis and design yields greater returns than focusing solely on coding, because fixing requirements or design errors later is far more costly than adjusting documentation early.

Finally, the author encourages readers to reflect on the cost differences between modifying code versus documentation and to adopt a disciplined engineering mindset.

All content is excerpted from the cited book.