Coding Errors: How to Prevent Them
I came across this article two hurricanes ago and thought I would write an article that might help people. I say this a bit tongue in cheek because most of us in IT know what the answer is to prevent the roll up of bad code but we live in a world where changes need to be made NOW or YESTERDAY.
The stress of that means that following the standards is often times too slow. So we try to force a faster process and then all heck happens and we are in trouble. The project takes two steps back.
I know it is very hard to keep up with security changes, code changes for growth, code changes for performance, code changes for our customer’s needs. It seems ever since we have joined the PC Universe everyone expects changes to happen fast and will you tell your boss or the customer this will take time? You get a stoned face glower. But these are the facts about solid coding that I don’t think will ever change.
You need good development guidelines, with rules and limitations and possible affects to related processes included, you need proper testing, code review that includes RUNNING THE CODE for effectiveness, efficiency and truthfulness. Testing plans with proofs for quality assurance testing, user testing in development. DOCUMENATATION, and then testing and quality assurance and final look at the truthfulness of the data in the Production environment. Lastly please do not forget that ROLL BACK PLAN, and test the ROLLBACK PLAN. If you are uploading code to regulated, life support applications, then you must always have a rollback plan.
We all know what we should be doing, the problem is we are overworked. The processes for approval can become rough to get through, people get sick go on vacation etc. The reality is that people want what they want when they want it and don’t always consider the time to properly implement changes in the environment. So work arounds are created. The thing I can tell you if you are a developer is if you are forced to make changes in production when you know the steps are not followed get the senior team member to write up that they are taking responsibility for the hot fix roll up. It gets really tough when you are trying to do things correctly and a person of authority is asking you to break your ethics for proper coding.
My two cents- Penny Garbus
