Strategies for maintaining Speed and Quality

The given below are some of the strategies that can be adopted or implemented to strive a balance between the speed and quality. At the end of the day we have to realize, that there is no perfect software, just the software that meet all the demands/ requirements of the clients/ people who are using the product.

Note: This achieving of balance is never a static process, rather it is more of a dynamic process, as the requirements of the project change and evolve as the market conditions differ.

1. Implementing agile and Devops practices

Agile techniques focuses on development, breaking down the project into iterations . On the other hand, Devops focuses on deployment, automating the process and ensures consistent delivery. Together these technologies work together creating a feedback loop, hence allowing the changes to be done to the software quickly with the help of the user feedback.

2. Know the cost of technical debt!

By definition, Technical debt in agile software development is the cost of rework that occurs when code is not well-designed, well-tested, or clean. Oftentimes, developers face tight deadline to deliver a certain product/ a feature. In order to achieve it they might skip the best practices, leading to poor quality of the code.

• Basically, it’s a comprise made to reach a goal. But, the question remains, at what cost!? What is the cost of reworking code in the future because of decisions made in the present!? What is might cost your company in the bigger picture?
• While this approach can provide short-term gains, it often results in maintenance challenges, reduced agility, and increased complexity down the line.

3. Practice refactoring

By definition, refactoring refers to improving/changing the structure/ design of the existing code, without actually changing it’s external behavior/ functionality. A refactored code, is cleaner, easy to maintain, hence runs longer in the software development cycle.

4. Use parallel testing

Sequentially execution can take time, compared to the statements that run parallelly. Running the tests parallelly can in in turn reduce the time to conduct unit and cross browser testing.

During your journey as a software developer, you might need to make trade-offs based on the project requirements and the debate between speed v/s quality is a long-standing one. It isn’t a this or that question. It completely depends on the use case, and what service your business has to offer.