Code Quality No Longer a Concern in the Age of No-code

It is never a good time to ask a developer to conduct a code review. He is just too pressed for time: Some tasks are waiting in the backlog, new projects are piling up in the pipeline, there are meetings to attend and deadlines to meet. Just like a Michelin-star chef doesn’t like tidying up the kitchen while he is focused on preparing his signature dish, asking a developer to review code, produce documentation or focus on limiting technical debt while he is struggling to meet deadlines can throw him off. But a Michelin-star chef can’t postpone tidying up forever if he is to keep those stars. Similarly, developers have to maintain a long-term vision that prioritizes code quality if they want their software products to last a long time.

The first thing we expect from high-quality code is for it to work and do what it was intended for. It should also be bug-free, but these are hardly enough. Bug-free code that works while creating a lot of technical debt is not desirable at all because poor code quality and the resulting inefficiency will eventually catch up with you down the road. Thankfully, there are some parameters that can guide us when we need to gauge the quality of some piece of code.

First of all, high-quality code should be reliable as measured by the number of failures occurring over a certain period of operation. Reliable code, in turn, makes the software more predictable and robust.

High-quality code is readable. It comes with correct indentation, comments where necessary and documentation to help reviewers, other developers and the end users. Refactoring legacy code might come in handy here: It not only makes code shorter and more readable but also renders it easier to manage, leaving less room for errors and security risks.

High-quality code is reusable. It is modular and lends itself to being used again.

High-quality code is easy to maintain. It requires less rework. As a result, updating or building upon it will be easy, which will drive down the cost of ownership of the particular software.

There are well-established methods to improve code quality: Sticking to a well-defined coding convention, having the code reviewed by at least two people, employing incremental but continuous integrations to detect problems right away, and using metrics to determine the frequency of defects and system complexity are some of them.

Another way to guarantee high-quality code is to take advantage of no-code technology.

No-code platforms are basically built on the principle of a trade-off between flexibility and system complexity: You are basically trading some of the flexibility afforded by coding for lower levels of complexity thanks to the higher level of abstraction involved. The byproducts of this trade-off are manageable technical debt and significantly less maintenance headache.

No-code platforms score high points on all the parameters cited above. These tools are developed with certain use cases and user personas in mind. Therefore, provided that you chose the right platform for your needs, you will find out that it is streamlined for the circumstances you will be operating in. The platform will take your high-level directions and choose the right kind of reusable blocks to form the code. Having been tested rigorously to industry standards, no-code platforms offer you the luxury of working with chunks of code you can move around with simple drag-and-drop actions, without the hassle of testing, reviewing and maintaining code.