Code Standards and Software Quality

To maintain quality of software is a big concern when working with the big teams having different level of expertise or with offshore teams. There are many tools and techniques are available in software industry. I am very interested in knowing that what other Technology Masters are doing to maintain code standards and quality of the software.

StyleCop:

StyleCop provides value by enforcing a common set of style rules for C# code. StyleCop will continue to ship with a single, consistent set of rules, with minimal rule configuration allowed. Developers can implement their own rules if they so choose. StyleCop ships with the ability to seamlessly integrate with Visual Studio, MSBuild, TFS, etc. Developers are free to implement custom code to integrate StyleCop into other development and tooling environments also. StyleCop is free. You can download Here. It feels boring while working with the StyleCop, as you may have to fix 20-30 issues for no reason but soon you will use to and will start writing the code to match standards. It checks spellings also in summary.

Static Code Analysis:

There are a lot of commercial and free static code analysers are available in market. Is it important to you or not is a separate discussion. If you are using Visual Studio Premium, It comes with a built-in Code analyser, that can be turned on from Project properties and You can set any rule set that suits to you. While working with the EPiServer products upgrades can cause some issues e.g. we upgraded a Site to latest EPiServer Commerce and EPiServer Find versions and it started giving us code analysis issues because EPiServer Commerce dlls were compiled with a different version of EPiServer.CMS.Core and EPiServer Find CMS Integration dlls were compiled with EPiServer.CMS.Core. we have to overrule the rule to fix this Code analysis issue. It is simple to overrule in project file true ExtendedCorrectnessRules.ruleset true /assemblycomparemode:StrongNameIgnoringVersion

Code Reviews:

Review each and every piece of code after completion of Backlog Item by a Technical Lead or a Senior Developer.