Software Development Best Practices Every Developer Should Know
As powerful and, sometimes, intimidating as Artificial Intelligence might be, a software developer must know and will always have to know how to code manually. Developers should understand what they’re doing, how their code behaves, and how to keep upgrading it without breaking everything; therefore, understanding best practices is still absolutely required. And, to help you with it, here’s a list of software development best practices to help you kickstart your career or improve it!
Why Software Development Best Practices Matter
The steady and quick development of automated software development tools, such as Lovable or Base64, makes it look as though knowing how to code is no longer important. But it absolutely is not true: artificial intelligence agents frequently miss, commit mistakes, don’t understand your prompts, and might even break your project all at once. Therefore, even advanced coding agents, such as Claude Code and Cursor Agent, still require human oversight to ensure they are operating effectively. And, to do so, you must always understand the best practices for software developers; this is going to be the biggest differential between developers in the future: those who know code and those who only know AI agents. Furthermore, as we will see next, good practices reduce rework, the risk of writing bugs, and the costs of developing software.
Impact on Quality, Scalability, and Long-Term Costs
Software development good practices were gradually summarized by experienced developers over decades of experience. They’ve come to notice that, for instance, when they don’t follow them, the software becomes less scalable: it is harder to implement new features, or fix old ones, to make it more performant and more secure, and to make it future-proof. All of this comes with a financial impact as well: the product cannot make progress and be improved, and so, when it is necessary to deal with the code mess, it will be expensive both in time-to-market and in required developer expertise. This means that the company will have to hire software developers with higher seniority, very possibly leaving behind those who wrote the messy code in the first place.
Impact on Team Productivity and Delivery Speed
By following coding best practices, your product’s codebase will become much more comprehensible, which can accelerate onboarding processes as developers gain a proper understanding of your systems. Also, development cycles will be much faster, as you don’t have to deal with the overhead of understanding how the code is structured, how the variables work, how the processes and functions connect, etc. Lastly, with a more organized and easily manageable code structure, bugs are naturally avoided or fixed when they arise; also, some other best practices require code to be thoroughly reviewed by your peers before shipping it. That greatly reduces the risks of developer mistakes going live, and all of it makes your system much more resilient and trustworthy.
Clean Code Principles: The Foundation of Stable and Maintainable Software
So, without further ado, here are some of the most important best practices in software development to help you write clean and maintainable code.
Writing Clean and Maintainable Code
There are three very basic clean code rules that very quickly set apart someone who really knows how to code and someone who’s barely started to learn how to write code. They list as followsÇ
- Write self-explanatory variable and function names: Usually, developers don’t care that much about naming conventions when they’re starting to learn how to code. It’s way faster to write your code if your variables are named “a”, “b”, and “c”; sometimes it will be much more efficient when you’re just trying to solve LeetCode exercises. But this vice doesn’t stand the test of time: when your names aren’t self-explanatory, you will forget what your function does after a short period of time. So, really, give variables and functions names that really represent what they are and what they do, even if that means the name gets long.
- Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY): DRY is an incredibly important principle to follow when developing high-quality code. It means that you should never repeat your code in the same project; that is, similar routines and logics must be packed within functions to be easily understood and reused. Repeated code can make the whole project become a mess very quickly, and might even make it slower to process, as compilers and interpreters will stumble upon it many times over. So, make sure to, whenever you’re writing a lot of code, stop and think whether or not you’ve repeated logic, loops, and whatnot to encapsulate it
- Write small functions: Another very important principle is that the bigger the function is, the harder it is to understand. Because of this, functions should not be big one-size-fits-all solutions that do everything, but clearly defined blocks of code that do exactly one thing, and do it very well and in a very structured and understandable way.
- Assert clear responsibilities: This principle extends the previous one, meaning a very similar thing but with a broader reach. This means that each file, each module, each folder, each class, each type must have a very specific use and responsibility. Things should not be mixed up, and one class should never have an overlapping logical context with another one, nor should it ever do the same to other classes. Otherwise, your codebase will be extremely confusing and hard to understand once you’ve started seeing it daily, and will be a nightmare for future developers as well.
These are the basics of writing scalable and modular code, with a high focus on maintainability, and are principles every developer must know by heart, to the point they don’t even think before applying. And, even though they are so basic, they are still the key to becoming a good developer, and the very first step to actually turning pro.
Modular Code Design for Future-Proof Software
That’s a best practice that somewhat overlaps with object-oriented programming (OOP): your code should be organized in logic blocks called classes, which encapsulate methods and attributes that pertain to their domain. That is, if your system has users, it makes sense that a User entity has a specific User class, and that its attributes, such as email and password, are contained within that class. Though your system might “work” if you’re using just an array full of objects to represent your users and with a different array with their emails, that’s not friendly to the developer, extremely sensitive to failures, and will result in bugs. It is much better to abstract your User entity behind a class, and even better if you can use a class that connects to your database for actual persistence.
This class must also follow the Single-Responsibility Pattern (SRP), which is one of the SOLID principles and determines that a class, module, or function needs to have exactly one responsibility. For instance, in our User example class, it makes no sense at all to have an attribute stating the year of his car: there should be another class to represent the vehicle, and at maximum, there’s a relation between classes. If this principle isn’t followed, the codebase becomes harder to understand and much more prone to having bugs, as the logics aren’t well-placed between the modules.
And, at last, your software should be divided into different layers. For instance, if it’s a backend service, you must have a router, controllers, services, repositories, etc, so that each layer has a specific purpose and implements the corresponding functionalities. This will almost entirely prevent you from not following DRY, as everything will be in its proper place and doing its proper function, letting you reuse your code and functions in a very natural and intuitive way.
Code Example: Before and After Clean Code Refactoring
To exemplify everything we’ve explained, here are two code blocks that show routines that might be very common within the use case of a SAP or something similar.
Bad code: confusing names, no functions, repetitive, and hard to understand
p = 100
d = 0.15
q = 3
# Calculate discount
t = p * d
f = p - t
print(f"Price: {p}, discount: {d}, total: {f}")
# Calculate discount again (duplicated code!)
p2 = 200
d2 = 0.15
q2 = 5
t2 = p2 * d2
f2 = p2 - t2
print(f"Price: {p2}, discount: {d2}, total: {f2}")
# Calculate discount one more time (more duplicated code!)
p3 = 50
d3 = 0.20
q3 = 2
t3 = p3 * d3
f3 = p3 - t3
print(f"Price: {p3}, discount: {d3}, total: {f3}")Good code: clear names, reusable functions, DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself)
def calculate_discounted_price(original_price, discount_percentage):
"""
Calculates the final price after applying a discount.
Args:
original_price: Product price before discount
discount_percentage: Discount percentage (e.g., 0.15 for 15%)
Returns:
Final price after discount
"""
discount_amount = original_price * discount_percentage
final_price = original_price - discount_amount
return final_price
def display_purchase_info(original_price, discount_percentage, quantity):
"""
Displays purchase information with a discount in a formatted way.
Args:
original_price: Unit price of the product
discount_percentage: Applied discount percentage
quantity: Number of products
"""
final_price = calculate_discounted_price(original_price, discount_percentage)
total_purchase = final_price * quantity
print(f"Product: ${original_price:.2f}")
print(f"Discount: {discount_percentage * 100:.0f}%")
print(f"Price with discount: ${final_price:.2f}")
print(f"Quantity: {quantity}")
print(f"Total purchase: ${total_purchase:.2f}")
print("-" * 40)
# Using the functions - clean, readable, and reusable code
display_purchase_info(original_price=100, discount_percentage=0.15, quantity=3)
display_purchase_info(original_price=200, discount_percentage=0.15, quantity=5)
display_purchase_info(original_price=50, discount_percentage=0.20, quantity=2)Conclusion: Building Software That Lasts
With this, we hope you’ve understood the importance of following the software engineering best practices during coding to create a well-structured, maintainable, and readable system. Though they are pretty basic rules, they’re crucial for the success in developing maintainable code that will probably be used across the years and by other developers as well. If, for instance, you don’t name your variables very well, you will surely forget what they’re meant for, and the code will be an absolute mystery for developers who don’t know it, and who didn’t code it in the first place. And if, on another instance, you don’t follow the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle, your code will be an absolute mess, and might even become slower just because of that.
So, as you can see, these best practices are the core concepts every developer should have embedded in their minds and follow naturally, without thinking about it. Think of them as the practice of driving: after a while, you don’t really think about driving, you just do it subconsciously. You should know these best practices by heart to the point where you do the same. Then you’ll start progressing to become a better developer, as even the harder concepts more or less relate to these we have enlisted here; for instance, SOLID is, very basically, a specification on how to better use these best practices.
And, if you’re a company seeking to hire custom front-end or back-end development services, you should know that good developers know these very basic principles by heart. If you ever see code that doesn’t follow these rules, then you can rest assured that they are really bad programmers and probably are not a good choice for developing your systems, no matter how cheap they are. These principles will, then, help you better judge how good developers are: if their code isn’t that easy to understand at a glance, then they probably are still in the very early learning stages.
