Ensuring quality of your software and code

When I usually write code I follow some guidelines to ensure that my code has a certain standard and I as any other developer try to ensure that my code and software is of quality.

Try to focus on the programming and not the understanding of the domain or any other pre-programming steps(in the answer that is!).

These are the following steps I live by:

Writing unit tests

Make it fail ( no code )
Make it Work ( working code )

Analysing abstraction

Extracting methods
Exteract interfaces

Refactoring

In addition to the above which is a part of refactoring, I also try to refactor the code with good tools such as ReSharper, CodeRush or others.

The question; What is the next step?

Commenting the code is trivial and shouldn't even have to be mentioned, but updated comments and xml-comments where it's needed / everywhere is something that I try to have.

But all the above helps he ensure that other developers might understand my code, that the code has some sort of quality and follows naming standards.

It does however not ensure any product quality.

I am looking for tools for post-development quality ensurance, such as profilers and how one would use these tools to increase product quality.

That's kind of what refactoring does, isn't it? Finding "bad" code and remove it. But +1 for "colleagues are experienced programmers", even though that's (hopefully) what one gets when you work on a software company.. in a perfect world anyways :)

Filip Ekberg 2010-05-26 10:41:51

IMHO refactoring is about making code that already works work in a "better" (or more efficient) way. A pure refactoring does not alter the functionality of the code. But it otfen exposes or hightlights parts of the code that would benefit from modified functionality.

MEMark 2010-05-26 10:52:02

By definition, refactoring does not change functionality. I am talking about "bad" code in that it contains bugs, which refactoring does not fix. The product quality is not influenced by refactoring, as the end user only sees the functionality, not the code.

Sjoerd 2010-05-26 10:52:44

@Sjoerd, Well the question somewhat states that I am looking for tools for this, is there a tool called "code review" which you recommend? Simply looking at the code wont ( in most cases ) find the bugs.

Filip Ekberg 2010-05-26 11:04:49

@Filip: we are talking about looking at the code, and this has been proven to catch more bugs than testing, believe it or not. See http://www.basilv.com/psd/blog/2007/strategies-for-effective-code-reviews for one source of this information. Whilst there are tools that aid the review process, they don't do it for you.

Martin 2010-05-26 12:16:25

Thanks, do you use TDD? Or when do you write the tests?

Filip Ekberg 2010-05-26 14:11:33

TDD all the time. I find it is the best way to get a set of useful test. We also do daily build and we run all our unit test on the daily build. This did not only improve the quality of the code but it also gave the whole team enough confidence to take ownship of the whole project.

Shivam 2010-05-26 17:29:20

So, you write your own test ( the driven tests that is ) and someone else creates unit tests / larger functionallity tests?

Filip Ekberg 2010-05-27 05:29:21

yes the TDD test are basically my test to see if the code is doing what I think it should be doing and the unit tests are the test that somebody else does to test my code to see if it matches what the specifications mean. This two person testing I think makes for better quality even if it might see as an overkill to have so much testing.

Shivam 2010-05-27 08:07:51

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Ensuring quality of your software and code

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