What is Code Quality? ✅

Lessons learned in over 10 years of helping engineering teams create high quality software.

This is a guest post written with Catarina Gralha, researcher and writer at Codacy, where she explores the practices that help teams create high quality software.

I love Codacy personally and I am thrilled to host one of their pieces today.

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Code quality is one of the most discussed topics in engineering, yet remains one of the most elusive.

Intuitively, it impacts your team’s ability to ship fast and often, while having an indirect impact on the customer experience. But how?

At Codacy we work with more than 250,000 developers, so we have a privileged window into their habits. By surveying many of them over the past year, two metrics stand out:

• 66% of developers are not satisfied with their current code quality.

• On average, 45% of development time is spent on maintenance.

How can we do better?

This article covers everything we learned about code quality in over 10 years of working on tools that help exactly with that.

We will talk about:

• 🚗 What code quality is and why it matters — a car metaphor.

• 🥇 Habits of top performing teams — to keep code quality high.

• 🔄 Quality is systemic — creating a system designed to produce quality.

• 🔨 Using a tool for quality — how tools can support your process.

• 📚 Books and resources — by our favorite authors, to deep dive more.

Let’s go!