Product Excellence Best Practices

What are the components that help teams to build quality into their outcomes?

The main goal is to create a baseline that developers could follow and be in a quality level that is well defined and measurable. The main parts to focus on are:

1. Testing
2. Code reviews
3. Static analysis
4. Health monitoring: availability, resilience, etc’.

Tests

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Code Reviews Will Improve You (And Your Code)

There are many options to improve your software quality.
One of the most effective methods is to do code reviews with other developers.
Code reviews are as much a social interaction as a technical best practice. In a healthy engineering culture (egoless), team members engage their peers to improve the quality of their code and increase their productivity. Developers understand that the time they spend looking at a colleague’s code is repaid when other team members examine their own deliverables. These days, most of the companies (e.g. Facebook, Netflix, Google, Amazon, Uber) are embracing it, so it’s another sign that something is working well here.
The important thing to remember when you are doing a code review is to be kind and to ask questions (clarifications) before you suggesting anything.

Why Ask For A Peer Review?

1. The most basic reason is to find bugs.
   If you won’t ask for it, you will miss bugs in your code:
   a. Accidental errors – typos or mixing variables.
   b. Structural errors – dead code, logic or algorithm bugs, performance or architecture concerns. These are often much easier to spot for an external reviewers the see your work from their perspective.
2. You preventing from yourself a great way to learn and get better – Committers are motivated by the notion of a viewer who will look over the change request: the committer tends to clean up loose ends, consolidate TODOs, and generally improve the commit.
3. Your code is not as clear as you think. Another developer will make it better both from its testability and readability aspects.

Code reviews are very important not only for developers but also to product managers, test engineers, designers and others.

In many cases, developers will be the first ones to see the benefits. It will allow them to move faster and with higher quality.

Code Without Tests?

Code without tests is bad code. Even if it’s looking clean and efficient. Without tests you can’t change it in a verifiable way.

You can’t know if your code is getting better or not.

It’s not a new idea.

But it’s amazing how many times developers will ‘cut’ corners or won’t implement tests because they are too busy to ship a new feature.

In many cases, it’s the opposite case, if you wish to move faster and safer – you need a good tests suite that give you the confidence that your changes didn’t break anything. You wish to have unit tests (wide coverage of functionality and running fast in an automated way), integration tests (a bit slower but still fast and in many cases, with mock data) and end to end tests (Yes, in many cases, in a real production environment).