How to Differentiate Quality Python Code for Your Business?

Python is one of the most popular languages in the world. There are many reasons for the success of Python and why it has been able to beat another popular language JAVA. But, statistics suggest that there are more than 8 million Python developers in the world today and as time passes by more and more organizations are adopting the language for developing applications, checking the quality of their code among other things. Even though Python is not much famous for enterprise development, the cloud technology titan Dropbox recently wrote 4 million lines of Python code for their application. The company did learn a lot in the process and now is an example to all those python developers India looking forward to building robust and high-quality applications in Python.

To build a robust application for an organization, it is a must to pay attention to the code quality. It might not appear trivial, but the quality of code can have a significant impact on your organization. A high-quality code ensures lesser time in testing, along with other factors. This gives a company an edge to excel in the market with fast and reliable deployment of products. Ensuring high code quality not just makes sure that applications are delivered timely at the customer’s end but also that intra-organization processes are simplified. However, in spite of the multitude of benefits that code quality offers, only a handful of organizations pay attention to it. They focus on getting the results in a manner that is satisfactory to the customers, ignoring the things happening at the back end. This might not seem like a problem if you’ve just entered the market or only delivered a handful of products. But, in the long run, the quality of your code starts affecting your business and impacts the reusability. Whether you believe it or not, code quality is a big deal for developers.

What is Quality Python Code?

Every organization wants quality code for their applications. But, only a few understand what quality code exactly is. For this reason, it becomes imperative to define code quality.

There are many ways that one can define code quality, but it primarily translates into how useful ad maintainable the quality of your code is. When looking at the end of the spectrum, it merely means high-quality code. But, you can break it down to a few identifiers to understand it comprehensively.

• Meets Expectations: The quality of your code must meet the expectations. In other words, it should precisely do what it is supposed to do. It is one of the fundamental factors of code quality.
• Free from Bugs: It might be a little challenging to say that code must always be free from bugs, because we all know in practical scenarios it is not possible. And that’s why organizations have quality analysis teams. But a high-quality code must contain as few bugs as possible.
• Maintainable: The maintenance of code is vital to an organization. You might need to add or remove features in subsequent updates. Unless your code is easily maintainable, developers will find it extremely challenging to add or remove new features from large scale applications.
• Reusable: One of the best parts of high-quality code is that it ensures reusability. When developing large scale applications, it is always an advantage to have piece of code that can be extended and used in other places easily.

Why does Quality Python Code Matter?

Code quality matters for a variety of reasons. If your code doesn’t accomplish what it is written for, there is no point of its existence. The question of high quality or low quality doesn’t even come to the picture if your code doesn’t fit the purpose.

Another aspect of code quality is its robustness. Let’s say that you’ve built an application that works well when it is run alone. However, things aren’t this way when a user uses it. The user might run a number of applications on their system at one time. In case your app crashes or does not deliver adequate performance when running with multiple apps, it means you have the code quality to blame. Minor issues can be fixed, but if there’s a long persisting problem with your code, you might not want to use it at all. Ultimately, your code quality affects the quality of your final product.

Similarly, if your code is nor easily readable or extendable, it won’t be able to sustain your product for long in the market. You might need to add new features or make changes to the existing processes, which is why your code must be maintainable and easy to understand.

How to Check the Quality of Your Python Code?

There are many things to consider when beginning the journey for obtaining high-code quality. It isn’t rigid, which is why organizations must incorporate the goals they’re trying to achieve. Here are some of the factors that will help you improve the quality of your Python code-

Style Guide

Python uses whitespace as indentation. Therefore, it is crucial to decide whether you want to use spaces or tabs while writing your code. Whatever you choose, make sure that it is consistent throughout the code. Even though it doesn’t change the outcome of the program, it is necessary to ensure code quality. It helps in making your code easy to read, maintain and extend by you and other developers over time.

Linters

Little mistakes, inconsistencies, style variations and logic defects don’t make your code look good. But, the point is that all developers make mistakes. Linters are tools that help in the identification of these little mistakes in your code. Be it a mistyped variable name, no closing bracket, inadequate number of arguments in a function, incorrect tabbing etc. Linters analyze codes and detect various categories of lints, such as logical and stylistic. Most Python editors run linters in the background as one types the code. Apart from inbuilt linters, developers can also choose others that help in simplifying the code. Some of these are Flake8, Pylama etc.

Conclusion

Checking your code quality isn’t something that occurs as an end process. It begins right from the time python developers India start writing codes. The key is to stay consistent, check code quality at the beginning, when you’re checked in and as you run your tests. Remember that high-quality code does what it’s supposed to without breaking. It is a process, not just a one-time experiment, which is why organizations must first be aware and then take adequate measures right from the beginning of their application.

Vijay Chauhan is a technical writer at NexSoftSys. He specializes in topics related to computer programming like DevOps Automation Services & Solutions India, Java, Big Data, Hadoop and CRM. Vijay has more than 8 years of work experience.