Code Review, Business Impact of Code Quality, State of DevOps 2022, Clean ABAP Change Proposals
Hi colleagues,
the plan for the engineering ecosystem newsletter is to switch between a newsletter focusing on one topic and a newsletter with a curation of several topics. This newsletter is a curation of Code Review Practices, the business impact of low code quality and the new State of DevOps report:
Google Engineering on Code Review Practices: The document describes Code Review practices at Google and is highly recommended if you want to improve the practice of code reviews in your team.
The enormous business impact of low code quality: There is a new research paper on the business impact of low code quality. While the numbers may be not exact and productivity is hard to measure in a complex system, the conclusion that code quality is important for sustainable productivity is founded on several studies. Below some findings:
Code quality remains an abstract concept that fails to get traction at the business level. Consequently, software companies keep trading code quality for time-to-market and new features. The resulting technical debt is estimated to waste up to 42% of developers’ time. At the same time, there is a global shortage of software developers, meaning that developer productivity is key to software businesses.
The overall economic cost is estimated to be $85 billion annually. This implies that there is an untapped potential in software projects if the code quality is improved and technical debt paid down or avoided.
We also note that typing is not the bottleneck, “the dominant maintenance activity” is understanding the existing code. Recent research indicates that, on average, developers spend about 60% of their time on program comprehension activities.
Due to the predicted global shortage of software developers organizations cannot hire as many developers as the perceived need. Our results indicate that improving code quality could free existing capacity; with 15 times fewer bugs, twice the development speed, and substantially more predictable issue resolution times, the business advantage of code quality should be clear.
State of DevOps report 2022: The new report adds additional insights especially around security and reliability. Further the report also shows how different factors (e.g. better security practices, testability, ... ) can lower burnout and improve health of the team members
Clean ABAP Change Proposal: There are currently some pull request open, which can change existing rules or even add new rules. If you want to have influence on the future direction of Clean ABAP, you can participate in the discussion around Enumerations or other open pull request.
Thanks and Regards,
Klaus
Why: More on my motivation to start the newsletter can be found in Collaboration on Improving: Why I’m starting the Engineering Ecosystem.
About me: I am Klaus Haeuptle an engineer and architect at SAP, the author of the books Clean ABAP and Clean SAPUI5, a coach for agile software engineering and a community servant leader for a large SAP internal grass roots community on improving tools, technologies, practices and culture, with more than 3000 participants from all locations and departments. Views are my own - the content published on this channel reflect my opinion and engineering principles.
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