How To Avoid Spaghetti Code

In software development, majority of developers work in collaboration. They use tools like Github, Bitbucket to share our code bases among themselves that makes their lives easier. It is essential to have a well-structured codebase for everyone to be able to follow-up the codebase and add new features. As your code base gets larger and more complex, symptoms of spaghetti code will become prevalent. Today we will discuss what is spaghetti code and how to avoid it.

Table of contents

• What Is Spaghetti Code
• Why Does Spaghetti Code Happen?
• How To Avoid Spaghetti Code

What Is Spaghetti Code

• 'Spaghetti Code' is a phrase, an antipattern for unstructured, difficult to maintain code that is every developer's nightmare. The word 'spaghetti' here refers to the flow of the program being tangled like 'spaghetti'. It is also referred as 'code that is difficult to follow by a human'.

• Code readability is one of the main key factors for productive teamwork, meaning that the code is understandable by other team members to add more functionality without having to discuss how it works. Your code should be understandable by others.

Why Does Spaghetti Code Happen? (Symptoms)

• Too many goto, break statements
  • Having a difficult-to-follow code structure can result in incomprehensible and unmaintainable programs.

    

  • If you have a look at the example above, it is incomprehensible to understand the flow of the program which makes it difficult to refactor and causes confusion.
• Inexperience with Software Programming Principles
  • There are several Programming Principles that help us improve our coding strategies. It is always useful to create sessions to cover the principles and share the knowledge across your team.
• Ineffective Code Reviews
  • When reviewing Pull Requests, it is important to take the common style guides, readability and complexity into account.
• No design before implementation
  • We should always think about the solution first, fully understand the problem we're trying to solve, design the solution, and then practice implementing the solution.
  • Here at Zensurance, one of our Technical Values is Non-programming is just as important as programming. Meaning Writing code is a last resort. We’re problem solvers first, and programmers second.
• No modularity
• Poor Naming Variables Functions
• Large files with too many lines of code
• Poor Documentation

How to avoid Spaghetti Code

• Think about having a well-formatted and a badly formatted code. Which one would run faster? In practice, both could run fast, rather with same complexity. But, if either one of them runs slow, which one is going to be easier to fix?

• Spaghetti Code aims to address this exact issue. We want our codebase to be refactorable as easier as possible, even for others, so that the time to improve complexity is improved.

Solutions

• Single-Responsibility Code (SRP)

  • Avoid Large, Multi Responsibility Classes or Methods
  • Maintain Self-Explanatory Code
    • Make sure to have proper function or variable names based on the functionality/usage.

• Test-Driven Implementation

  • Test-driven Implementation combines test-first development where you write a test before you write just enough production code to fulfill that test.

• Refactoring

  • Refactoring an approach to change the structure of the program whereas the functionality remains the same. A well-structured code base should be always open for refactoring.

  • Reasons why refactoring is important:

    • To improve the design of software/application
    • To find bugs, make software easier to understand
    • To make program run faster
    • To fix existing legacy database
    • To support revolutionary development
    • To provide greater consistency for users

  • Think about performance, understand what it takes to refactor

    • When refactoring, make sure to not create any new Sphagetti Code by keeping in mind the principles and best practices that are acknowledged by your team.

      

What's Next?

• Spaghetti Code is a problem that could happen to any team or a developer, regardless of their experience. It is crucial to avoid as much as possible to provide quality code that can be;

  • Refactorable
  • Readable
  • Documentable
  • Test friendly
  • Performant

• Here at Zen, we value how important the Spaghetti Code Free codebase is and do our very best to prevent it from happening!

Happy Coding 😍