11 Best Practices and Tools to Improve the Java Code Quality
Tags: java, productivity, codequality
Published: 2019-10-22 08:52:08

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Usually, if you work on a software project and especially at the beginning of it, the code quality is not the first thing you pay attention to. However, the question of how to improve code quality and efficiency should be one of the main concerns for the <a href="https://www.romexsoft.com/hire-java-developers/">java developers</a>, technical team lead, system architect, and even project manager. How to improve the Java code quality?</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The code quality improvement is one of the things that require a well-developed strategy and adhering to it throughout the project’s life cycle. It is only a matter of time when it will catch you up and cause the problems if you will just leave it unaddressed. That is why it is much better to manage this problem beforehand.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">At Romexsoft, we commonly use Java for our projects and always look at the ways how to improve code quality in Java. We do this by following software quality improvement techniques</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and using </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Java Code Quality tools </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">that help us not only to improve our code but also our productivity.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">In this article, we will take a look at the most used development methodologies and top-notch tools that we use to create better code. The intent is to consider the common approaches to code quality and help teams choose methodology and tool, that makes their process efficiently.</span>
<h2><span style="font-weight: 400;">What is a Software Development Methodology?</span></h2>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The software development methodology</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is a set of patterns and rules that are used to structure, plan, and control the process of software solutions developing. In order to manage the development process efficiently, the project manager must select the development methodologies that suit the appropriate project the most. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">So, let’s run through some of them to understand, why different methodologies exist and which of them are the most commonly used.</span>
<h3><strong>Pair Programming</strong></h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Pair programming is a proven methodology that decreases bugs in your code. It is done by two developers who share one workspace (a keyboard and a screen) and it looks like a flashback from school or university - one developer is coding while another reads the written code and contemplates potential issues. Developers coach each other in coding and can change roles during a session.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The main benefit of pair programming is knowledge sharing and code quality improvement. It also improves communication inside the team. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Pair programming is not only about the code but it can be used for OS command lines, work with DB server, file management, work with cloud and many other cases.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">So if you work on the more complex or critical items feel free to team up with your co-workers and use this methodology to prevent bugs/issues in your code. Given the higher costs of bugs/issues that will be found later during development or after the release pair programming saves your time and money.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Considering the common knowledge that ‘two heads are better than one’, the discussion about pair programming seems to have died down and people actually do practice it.</span>
<h3><strong>Coding Conventions </strong></h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Coding conventions are the set of guidelines that are developed by dev teams and include the recommendations for the programming style, practices, and methods for each aspect of a code that is written within the company or certain project. These conventions are usually specific for every programming language and cover file organization, indentation, comments, declarations, statements, white spaces, naming conventions, programming practices and principles, programming rules, architectural best practices, etc. The main advantage of defined standards is that every piece of code looks and feels familiar. It makes it more readable and helps programmers understand code written by another programmer.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">If the coding standards are followed by and applied consistently throughout the development process, in the future, it will be easier to maintain and extend the code, refactor it, and resolve integration conflicts. The standard itself matters much less than adherence to it.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Code conventions are important to programmers for a number of reasons:</span>
<ul>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">40% - 80% of the lifetime cost of software goes to maintenance.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hardly any software is maintained for its whole life by its author.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Code conventions improve the readability of the software, allowing programmers to understand the new code more quickly.</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Frankly speaking, I am a big fan of coding standards. For me, it makes sense to spend time debating and arguing over them, since it is a valuable contribution to save your time and efforts in the future. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Start with arranging a meeting on what should be in the coding standard. It should be only a face to face meeting, but not over email or via the chat systems. Discuss the rules that you decided to include in your code convention. The rules that are agreed by the majority of the team should be accepted as “mandatory" and other rules can be considered as “optional”.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The code convention guidelines should be reviewed frequently. Rules can be moved from “mandatory” to “optional” and vice versa. If some of them do not work as expected, then they need to be reworked or removed from the guidelines. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Programmers are highly recommended to follow these guidelines during the coding and it should be used as part of the code review which is the next one in our list.</span>
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<h3><strong>Code Review</strong></h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The next best thing to pair programming is code review. If you do not practice pair programming then it is recommended to consider at least code review. It is a lightweight process that should be applied as soon as possible after the code is written.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Some of the other subjects listed below are not so obvious but are worth to be considered. Let's continue.</span>
<h3><strong>Unit Tests</strong></h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The next methodology we will talk about is unit testing. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Depending on your experience you may or may not have heard something about unit tests, test-driven development or some other type of testing methodology. Usually, these methodologies are applied in the context of large software systems and sometimes in the context of simple web sites.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">In computer programming, unit testing is a software development process in which the smallest testable part of source code, called unit, is tested individually and independently to examine whether they are working as expected. This helps you to identify failures in the algorithms and/or logic before the code is released.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">One of the benefits that you acquire from creating unit tests is that your team will be motivated to write testable code. Since unit testing requires the appropriate structure of your code it means that code must be divided into smaller more focused functions. Each of which is responsible for a single operation on a set of data rather than on large functions performing a number of different operations.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The second benefit of writing a well-tested code is that you can prevent future failure when the small changes to existing code break functionality. When a failure happens you will be informed that you have written something wrong.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">At first, glance, spending time on writing the unit tests during development looks like extra expenses. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">However, it will save time you might spend on debugging. This should be a step by step process. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Of course, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">you can not write unit tests for every part of your project but you need to make sure the core components behave as expected. When the project grows you can simply run the tests you have developed to ensure that existing functionality is not broken when new functionality is introduced.</span>
<h3><span style="font-weight: 400;"><strong>Test-Driven Development</strong></span></h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Test-driven development (TDD), also called test-driven design, is a methodology of developing software that combines unit testing, programming, and refactoring of source code. Usually, developers tend to skip the architectural aspect of software development and jump straight into coding. They try to get a rough implementation and only after having a working prototype they think about writing the tests. While this approach can succeed it takes a lot of effort to just make it work.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">TDD is one of those practices which contribute to better code quality and decreases bugs. It was introduced as part of a larger software design paradigm known as Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP), which are types of the Agile software development methodology. TDD helps to produce applications of high quality in less time. Proper implementation of TDD requires the developers and testers to accurately anticipate how the application and its features will be used in the real world.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">When it is run as part of a continuous integration cycle with frequent automated builds and tests, the practice is Unit Testing on steroids. In order to apply this methodology, developers need specific training and coaching.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">In my understanding of TDD, before coding, you need to know (at least) the starting point. First of all, you need to think of the objects and their behavior to solve the given problem. When doing TDD you start from a test and from your dream vision of how the test would look like.</span>
<h3><strong>Continuous Integration </strong></h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Continuous Integration</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (CI) </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">is a development practice that requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day (SVN, Subversion, or Git). Each check-in is verified by the automated tests. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Although automated tests are not strictly part of CI, they are usually anticipated.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Such an approach allows developers to detect problems earlier and, as a result, solve them faster.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">This is a valuable practice by itself. You should focus on setting up a simple Continuous Integration process as early as possible. There are many tools that can help you to set up this process and the most known are</span><a href="https://jenkins.io/"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Jenkins</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">,</span><a href="https://www.atlassian.com/software/bamboo"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Bamboo</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, and</span> <a href="https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Teamcity</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. They allow you to automate your software deployment and let you focus on building your product.</span>
<h3><strong>Demo Session</strong></h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The demo review meeting usually takes place close to the end of the Sprint. The purpose of this meeting is to show the other team members, customers, and stakeholders the results of the work team have accomplished over the Sprint.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">It may not be immediately visible why it leads to a better code but it will. By regularly showing the source code developers need to keep it close to the release state. With demo meetings on a regular basis, you will have a well-organized process of receiving feedback. And this will give you a better understanding of</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> what was done right and will indicate when something went in the wrong direction.</span>

Now, let's move on and check w<span style="font-weight: 400;">hat are some recommended code quality tools to polish the process.</span>
<h2><strong>Tools to Improve Java Code Quality</strong></h2>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">There is no developer who never made a mistake. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Usually, the compiler catches the syntactic and arithmetic issues and lists out a stack trace. But there still might be some issues that compiler does not catch. These could be inappropriately implemented requirements, incorrect algorithms, bad code structure or some sort of potential issues that the community knows from experience. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The only way to catch such mistakes is to have some senior developer to review your code. Such an approach is not a panacea and does not change much. With each new developer in the team, you should have an extra pair of eyes that will look at his/her code. But luckily there are many tools that can help you control code quality</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> including Checkstyle, PMD, FindBugs, SonarQube, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">etc. All of them are usually used to analyze the quality and build some useful reports. Very often those reports are published by continuous integration servers, like Jenkins.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Here is a checklist of Java static code analysis tools, that we use at RomexSoft in most of our projects. Let's review each of them.</span>
<h3><strong>Checkstyle</strong></h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Code reviews are essential to code quality, but usually, no one in the team wants to review tens of thousands of lines of code. But the challenges associated with manually code reviews can be automated by source code analyzers tool like </span><a href="http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Checkstyle</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Checkstyle is a free and open-source static code analysis tool used in software development for checking whether Java code conforms to the coding conventions you have established. It automates the crucial but boring task of checking Java code. It is one of the most popular tools used to automate the code review process. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Checkstyle comes with predefined rules that help in maintaining the code standards. These rules are a good starting point but they do not account for project-specific requirements. The trick to gain a successful automated code review is to combine the built-in rules with custom ones as there is a variety of tutorials with how-tos.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Checkstyle can be used as an</span><a href="https://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/checkstyle-plug"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Eclipse plugin</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> or as the part of a built system such as</span><a href="http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/anttask.html"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Ant</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">,</span><a href="https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-checkstyle-plugin"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Maven</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> or</span><a href="https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/checkstyle_plugin.html"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Gradle</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to validate code and create reports coding-standard violations.</span>
<h3><strong>PMD</strong></h3>
<a href="https://pmd.github.io/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">PMD</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is a static code analysis tool that is capable of automatically detect a wide range of potential bugs and unsafe or non-optimized code. It examines Java source code and looks for potential problems such as possible bugs, dead code, suboptimal code, overcomplicated expressions, and duplicated code. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Whereas other tools, such as Checkstyle, can verify whether coding conventions and standards are respected, PMD focuses more on preemptive defect detection. It comes with a rich and highly configurable set of rules that you can easily configure and choose which particular rules should be used for a given project.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">The same as Checkstyle, PMD can be used with</span> <a href="https://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/eclipse-pmd"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Eclipse</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">,</span><a href="https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/1137-pmdplugin"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">IntelliJ IDEA</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">,</span><a href="https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-pmd-plugin"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Maven</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">,</span><a href="https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/pmd_plugin.html"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Gradle</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> or</span><a href="https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/PMD+Plugin"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">Jenkins</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Here are a few cases of bad practices that PMD deals with:</span>
<ul>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Empty try/catch/finally/switch blocks.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Empty if/while statements.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Dead code.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cases with direct implementation instead of an interface.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Too complicated methods.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Classes with high Cyclomatic Complexity measurements.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Unnecessary ‘if’ statements for loops that could be ‘while’ loops.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Unused local variables, parameters, and private methods.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Override hashcode() method without the equals() method.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Wasteful String/StringBuffer usage.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Duplicated code – copy/paste code can mean copy/paste bugs, and, thus, bring a decrease in maintainability.</span></li>
</ul>
<h3><strong>FindBugs</strong></h3>
<a href="http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">FindBugs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> is an open-source Java code quality tool similar in some ways to Checkstyle and PMD, but with a quite different focus. FindBugs doesn’t concern the formatting or coding standards but is only marginally interested in best practices. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">In fact, it concentrates on detecting potential bugs and performance issues and does a very good job of detecting a variety of many types of common hard-to-find coding mistakes, including thread synchronization problems, null pointer dereferences infinite recursive loops, misuse of API methods, etc. FindBugs operates on Java bytecode, rather than source code. Indeed, it is capable of detecting quite a different set of issues with a relatively high degree of precision in comparison to PMD or Checkstyle. As such, it can be a useful addition to your static analysis toolbox.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">FindBugs is mainly used for identifying hundreds of serious defects in large applications that are classified into four ranks:</span>
<ul>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">scariest</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">scary</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">troubling</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">of concern</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Let's take a closer look at some cases of bugs.</span>
<h4><b>Infinite recursive loop</b></h4>
<blockquote style="font-size: 14px; background-color: #f4f4f4;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">public String resultValue() {</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">return this.resultValue();</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">}</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Here, the result value() method is called recursive inside itself.</span>
<h4><b>Null Pointer Exception</b></h4>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">FindBug examines the code for the statement that will surely cause the NullPointerException.</span>
<blockquote style="font-size: 14px; background-color: #f4f4f4;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Object obj = null;</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">obj.doSomeThing(); //code execution will cause the NullPointerException</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The below code is a relatively simple bug. If the ‘obj’ variable will contain null and ‘str’ variable has some instance it will surely lead to the NullPointerException.</span>
<blockquote style="font-size: 14px; background-color: #f4f4f4;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">if((str == null &amp;&amp; obj == null) || str.equals(obj)) {</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">//do something</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">}</span></blockquote>
<h4><b>A method whose return value should not be ignored</b></h4>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The string is an immutable object. So ignoring the return value of the method will be reported as a bug.</span>
<blockquote style="font-size: 14px; background-color: #f4f4f4;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">String str = "Java";</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">str.toUpper();</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">if (str.equals("JAVA"))</span></blockquote>
<h3><b>Suspicious equal() comparison</b></h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The method calls equals(Object) on references of different class types with no common subclasses.</span>
<blockquote style="font-size: 14px; background-color: #f4f4f4;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Integer value = new Integer(10);</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">String str = new String(“10”);</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">if (str != null &amp;&amp; !str.equals(value)) {</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">//do something;</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">}</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The objects of different classes should always compare as unequal, therefore !str.equals(value) comparison will always return false.</span>
<h4><b>Hash equals mismatch</b></h4>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">The class that overrides equals(Object) but does not override hashCode() and uses the inherent implementation of hashCode() from java.lang.The object will likely violate the invariant that equal objects must have equal hashcodes.</span>
<h4><b>Class does not override equals in the superclass</b></h4>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Here’s a case: the child class that extends a parent class (which defines an equals method) adds new fields but does not override an equals method itself. Thereby, equality on instances of child class will use the inherited equals method and, as a result, it will ignore the identity of the child class and the newly added fields.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">To sum up, FineBug is distributed as a stand-alone GUI application but there are also plugins available for Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, Gradle, Maven, and Jenkins. Additional rule sets can be plugged in FindBugs to increase the set of checks performed.</span>
<h3><strong>SonarQube</strong></h3>
<a href="https://www.sonarqube.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">SonarQube</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">is an open-source platform that was originally launched in 2007 and is used by developers to manage source code quality. Sonar was designed to support global continuous improvement strategy on code quality within a company and therefore can be used as a shared central system for quality management. It makes the management of code quality possible for any developer in the team. As a result, in recent years it has become a world’s leader in Continuous Inspection of code quality management systems.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Sonar currently supports a wide variety of languages including Java, C/C++, C#, PHP, Flex, Groovy, JavaScript, Python, and PL/SQL (some of them via additional plugins). And Sonar is very useful as it offers fully automated analysis tools and integrates well with Maven, Ant, Gradle, and continuous integration tools. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Sonar uses FindBugs, Checkstyle and PMD to collect and analyze source code for bugs, bad code, and possible violation of code style policies. It examines and evaluates different aspects of your source code from minor styling details, potential bugs, and code defects to the critical design errors, lack of test coverage, and excess complexity. In the end, Sonar produces metric values and statistics, revealing problematic areas in the source that require inspection or improvement.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Here is a list of some of SonarQube‘s features:</span>
<ul>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">It doesn’t show only what’s wrong. It also offers quality management tools to help you put it right.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">SonarQube addresses not only bugs but also coding rules, test coverage, code duplications, complexity, and architecture providing all the details in a dashboard.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">It gives you a snapshot of your code quality at a certain moment of time as well as trends of lagging and leading quality indicators.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">It provides you with code quality metrics to help you take the right decision.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">There are code quality metrics that show your progress and whether you're getting better or worse.</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">SonarQube is a web application that can be installed standalone or inside the existing <a https://www.romexsoft.com/java-development/>Java web application</a>. The code quality metrics can be captured by running mvn sonar:sonar on your project.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Your pom.xml file will need a reference to this plugin because it is not a default maven plugin.</span>
<blockquote style="font-size: 14px; background-color: #f4f4f4;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">&lt;build&gt;</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">               …</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">               &lt;plugins&gt;</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">                              &lt;plugin&gt;</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">                                             &lt;groupId&gt;org.sonarsource.scanner.maven&lt;/groupId&gt;</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">                                             &lt;artifactId&gt;sonar-maven-plugin&lt;/artifactId&gt;</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">                                             &lt;version&gt;3.3.0.603&lt;/version&gt;</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">                              &lt;/plugin&gt;</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">               &lt;/plugins&gt;</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">               …</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">&lt;/build&gt;</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Also, Sonar provides an enhanced reporting via multiple views that show certain metrics (you can configure which ones you want to see) for all projects. And what’s most important, it does not only provide metrics and statistics about your code but translates these nondescript values to real business values such as risk and technical debt.</span>
<h3><strong>Time for conclusions</strong></h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Over the years of working on different software development projects, we have accumulated our own experience of making the good code better. And here’re things we recommend to do during the whole process  to improve the code quality:</span>
<ul>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Follow the programming language style guide.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adhere to SOLID principles in your design.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Give descriptive names for methods and variables.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Do not overdesign.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Use design patterns.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Do not reinvent a wheel and use third-party frameworks.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Use efficient data structures and algorithms.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Create Unit tests.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Document all aspects of your project.</span></li>
 	<li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Keep all elements of your project under the version control system.</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">By doing all these points and using the code quality analysis tools in conjunction with development methodology in your everyday programming practices you will eventually create more readable, more thoroughly tested, more likely to run correctly, and much simpler to revise the code. You will also save yourself, your team and your customers from a lot of headaches, time and, therefore, money.</span>

<i><span style="font-weight: 400;">If this is what you would like to experience within all development process, don’t hesitate to contact Romexsoft. We know how to ship quality code and bring the best experience for our clients.</span></i>

Written by <span style="color: #ff6600;">Romexsoft</span> on September 13, 2017
Originally published at Romexsoft Blog <a href="https://www.romexsoft.com/blog/improve-java-code-quality/">11 Best Practices and Tools to Improve the Java Code Quality</a>

<span style="color: #ffffff;"><em>Author: Yura Bondarenko</em></span>