Before learning to develop good software, we need to understand what is defined as a good software. This tutorial explains some of the traits of a well designed software.

Chracteristic of a Good software

There are several qualities that make software good.

  • Functionality: This is the core aspect of a given software - does the software do what it’s supposed to do, and do it well? It should have all the features that users need to accomplish their tasks.
  • Usability: Is the software easy to learn and use? Is it user-friendly? A good interface will be intuitive and user-friendly, even for people who aren’t tech-savvy.
  • Reliability: The software product has to be reliable. It should behave consistently without any errors.
  • Security: This is especially important for software that deals with sensitive information. In daily life, we use lots of software products to perform our day to day work. The software should have strong security measures in place to protect user data from unauthorized access. You don’t want your bank credentials to be exposed to any other person.
  • Performance: Good software should run smoothly and efficiently without using excessive resources. It should be responsive and not laggy.
  • Maintainability: Well-designed software should be easy to modify and maintain. Adding new features will not break other parts of the code. They will have good test coverage to ensure we don’t break other parts of the code.
  • Scalability and Elasticity: The software should be scalable to seasonal variations in user requests. You don’t want an ecommerce application to go down during black friday sales. If a software product goes down, it results in financial losses due to lost customer orders. Also, you don’t want it to burn unnecessary money when user requests are low. So, it should scale down resources if there are not enough users.

Code Reuse:

A good software would reuse existing code base. It would try to not repeat the same code multiple times. Nowadays, there are IDEs out there suggesting if there is duplicate code base and promotes extracting those repeated code into a function. Repeated code can be source of various kinds of bugs. For example, if we had the same configuration being used in two locations, but we defined it twice. The next time, we want to change the config value, we have to change at both locations. If we miss one, we risk breaking one part of the software. The code reuse also reduces software development time and costs.

Testing:

Software should have unit tests and integration tests at a minimum. Unit tests let us test a particular part of a code, a module or a function. If you want to modify a function, you want to be sure that you don’t break other parts of the code. How many times have you noticed that you get a new repository to work on, but you are afraid to make changes because you don’t want to break the application. This is because the application was missing unit tests. If there were unit tests and integration tests, a developer would be less fearful of making mistakes. Of course, the tests need to be well written to cover corner cases, but that’s a different debate altogether. A good software might also have End to End tests and Acceptance tests to further validate its behavior.

Flexibility:

The software is bound to change as it matures. Every software you might have interacted with were having a different look and feel earlier and they change over time. A good software should be flexible enough to allow code changes easily. It should be easy to extend the funtionalities of a software. If a code is well-written, it will have minimal changes to other parts of the software and is less likely to break other modules of the software.

There are few popular acronyms which defines a good design principles

1. YAGNI (You Ain’t Gonna Need It)

In the software development industry, the YAGNI principle stands for “You Aren’t Gonna Need It”, it encourages programmers to resist the temptation of incorporating unnecessary features or functionalities prematurely. This principle highlights that adding unnecessary features results in a host of complications:

  1. Increased Complexity: Unnecessary features inject complexity into the codebase, making it complicated to understand. This not only slows down development speed but also complicates bug-fixing efforts.
  2. Wasted Time: Putting efforts into building features takes efforts away from addressing important priorities.
  3. Potential for Bugs: With each line of code added, the likelihood of bugs increases. These additional features are more likely to have bugs and security vulnerabilities.

2. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)

The KISS principle stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid” is a design and development philosophy that emphasizes simplicity. Most systems work best when they are designed and built to be as simple as possible. Complexity should be avoided whenever possible. This is related to YAGNI principle above. It leads to simple code which is easier to understand. This also leads to less errors and makes sofware maintainable.

3. DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself)

The DRY principle in software development stands for “Don’t Repeat Yourself”. It emphasizes on avoiding code duplication. The DRY principle encourages you to find ways to eliminate this repetition. Here are some common techniques for achieving DRY code:

  • Functions: Break down common logic into reusable functions. This allows you to call the function from any part of your code where you need that functionality.
  • Classes: If you have a set of related functions and data, encapsulate them in a class or a module. This can help to improve code organization and maintainability.
  • Variables and constants: Use variables and constants to store values that are used in multiple places in your code. This makes it easier to update those values if needed. We just have to modify them at one place.

Below are some of the benefits of this principle.

  1. DRY code is easier to update and fix because you only need to make changes in one place.
  2. Software code becomes easier to read and understand because there is less duplication.
  3. The code becomes less likely to have bugs because there are fewer opportunities for errors to be introduced.