Software plays a crucial role in today’s marketplace. As the world is moving towards SaaS, it is becoming more critical now than ever for every corporate, startup, or individual to have the best software quality to be a differentiator and lead the industry. We have often heard the term “Enterprise-grade” used as a buzzword or a marketing scheme to attract customers. What does this term mean, and why does it carry so much cache? Why is it so important to have a premium codebase, and how do the big players in the field do it today?
In this series of articles, we aim to discover and share our two cents on enterprise-grade code and how you can maintain it.
“A lousy code is like a lousy marriage, tough to maintain and destined to failure.”
Bursting the bubble around the term Enterprise-grade
In the software engineering world, there is no silver bullet definition for being enterprise-grade. The term changes its meaning with time, context, budget, infrastructure, etc. Multiple factors influence the meaning of being enterprise-grade in the industry; what could have been termed Enterprise-grade code in the ’80s would be absolutely irrelevant today.
Even though writing and maintaining code for enterprise-grade software has changed significantly over time, the basic fundamental concepts remain the same. These are what we call the golden rules of coding. These include but are not limited to documentation, comments, lint-free, consistent, extendable, modular, testable, interoperable, and portable.
Best Practices — The Saviour
From the very beginning, we have been taught “Follow the best”; whether in academics, the real world, or any situation, one must follow the best to achieve success. Does this mean that we should follow every best practice introduced by the software engineering world ever to have production software? The answer is no. Like there is no precise definition for an enterprise-grade codebase, there exists no set of practices explicitly tailored to your application. One must understand the context and purpose behind an application to decide what works best for them.
Context is one of the most important, if not the most important, factor in determining the application’s code quality.
By definition, “A programming context can be defined as all the relevant information that a developer needs to complete a task.”
This ensures that the team understands the problem well and then decides the most optimal strategy to achieve their business goal via code. It is indispensable for a corporate’s success that all its developers understand the context behind a feature or application before making any technical decisions.
The context keeps changing
In this fast-paced, dynamic world, an enterprise needs to redefine the context frequently to flourish in the industry and be at par or surpass the competition. Factoring this context into the codebase should be prioritized at all software development processes.
One of the best examples of this is the e-commerce giant eBay. The company has seen so many technological changes over the years, constantly adapting, improving, and growing its infrastructure. In its early days, the business goal was to save time and allow developers to create and deploy new features independently and quickly to be the primary in the market. As a result, they built the application using Perl, which provided them with a fast development cycle and was relatively more manageable to save time. As the business needs grew, the entire codebase for refactored to Java-based tech stack, providing scalability and stability.
Why is it imperative to maintain code?
Now that we have a brief understanding of what an enterprise-grade code means and what points to keep in mind while making technical decisions, let’s talk about code’s life. Like a human life, code also goes through a lifecycle, and after a certain point, it becomes obsolete. Our codebases need to adapt to the changing circumstances. A dead codebase exposes many security vulnerabilities, is challenging to decipher, refactor and navigate, and is costly to optimize. Code is read many more times than it is written. Writing code costs something, but over time the cost of reading is often higher. Anyone who ever looks at a piece of code must invest brain-power into figuring out what it does.
Codebases must be modernized and maintained.
The author, Mohamad Aladdin, suggests that one should “think of your code quality as if it will run forever, but adapt to change as if your code will be obsolete tomorrow.”
Legacy code — Your Archenemy
Legacy code does not have to be your archenemy. As applications grow and features are added, the code bases must be refactored, revisited, and reviewed frequently. Imagine how happy your dev team will be if the codebase is elementary to understand and navigate. It’s not only about a happy dev team updating the legacy code translates to “Accessibility,” “Workability,” “Scalability,” and “Security,” among many others.
What does refurbishing the codebase even mean? Like everything we have discussed so far, there is no one-size-fits-all for this as well. It means starting where you are, slowly and steadily making changes to your codebase to improve it every day. It could be a version upgrade, architecture migration, modern databases, monolith to microservices, or even down-paying technical debt by enabling CI/CD pipelines.
It’s taking one step at a time to befriend your legacy code.
Conclusion
Owning and developing an enterprise-grade code is that X factor in a successful recipe. A healthy codebase underpins the success of your enterprise. We want to share with you different tools, concepts, and methodologies to develop an enterprise-grade code through this series of articles. Nothing brings us more joy than geeking on something that can impact more than a billion lives in a better way. Technology is the future, and sharing our two cents on this is our way of helping the community grow. Stay tuned for the next article describing the golden rules you should keep in mind while developing enterprise-grade software!
References
https://sandimetz.com/blog/2017/6/1/the-half-life-of-code https://corgibytes.com/blog/2020/11/24/modernize-your-codebase/
