Proactive Software Maintenance: Best Practices for Developers

The first quarter of a new year is the perfect time to review processes, improve efficiency, and ensure proactive and troubleshooting checklists are up to date. By continuously refining our approach, we can enhance performance, security, and overall software quality for the year ahead.

Here are some housekeeping items and software best practices to help you compile or compare your own.

Codebase Cleanup

• Remove Dead Code: Identify and delete unused or redundant code to reduce clutter and potential confusion. This cleanup should happen as soon as code isn’t used anymore, not just annually. Rather, update the code base to use the latest version of development tools, whether that occurs once a year or several times a year.
• Refactor Code: Refactoring code is essential for maintaining clean, efficient, and scalable software. It simplifies overly complex functions, improves naming conventions, improves readability, reduces technical debt, enhances performance, and makes future modifications easier. Regular refactoring helps prevent code rot and ensures the software remains maintainable over time. The frequency of refactoring depends on the project’s complexity and development pace, but it is best performed continuously as part of the development cycle.
• Archive Depreciated Features: Document and archive old features that are no longer in use. This ensures that old features do not clutter the active codebase, reducing maintenance costs and security risks while keeping the software streamlined. Stores these features in version control systems, internal documentation, or separate repositories, so they can be revisited if and as needed.

Dependency Management

• Update Dependencies: Upgrade to the latest stable versions of libraries and frameworks to fix vulnerabilities and access new features. This can also improve performance, fix bugs, and patch security vulnerabilities. Regularly updating dependencies helps keep a project stable, secure, and maintainable over time.
• Remove Unused Dependencies: Audit the codebase for unnecessary libraries and eliminate them to reduce bloat and attack vectors.
• Verify Licensing Compliance: Ensure all dependencies are compliant with your organization’s licensing policies.

Documentation Overhaul

• Update Documentation: Refresh outdated README files, API docs, and inline comments.
• Standardize Format: Use a consistent format for documentation across the project. This includes using the same templates, headings, terminology, code comment styles, and file organization for API docs, README files, design specifications, and user guides. This standardization will improve readability and make it easier for developers to find and understand information, which also enhances team collaboration.
• Generate Missing Docs: Create new documentation for under-documented modules or features.

Security Audit

• Review Access Controls: Audit who has access to your repositories, databases, and production environments.
• Run Vulnerability Scans: Use tools to identify and resolve vulnerabilities. There are several available, depending on the necessary scope, like general network security, to specialized web application scanning.
• Implement Secrets Management: Remove hardcoded secrets and implement secure vault solutions so that API keys, passwords, encryption keys, and database credentials are securely stored and handled.

CI/CD Pipeline Maintenance

CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) pipeline maintenance refers to the ongoing process of ensuring that a CI/CD pipeline remains efficient, secure, and reliable.

• Test Pipeline Performance: Ensure builds are efficient and remove unnecessary steps or bottlenecks to optimize build times.
• Add Missing Tests: Expand test coverage to include edge cases and under-tested areas.
• Monitoring and Logging: Tracking pipeline performance helps detect failures and identify bottlenecks for quick resolutions.
• Review Configurations: Update environment settings, infrastructure as code (IaC) configurations, and deployment strategies as needed.

Performance Optimization

• Review and Test Database Queries: Optimize queries for speed and efficiency, check for potential indexing issues and then test.
• Analyze Bottlenecks: Use profiling tools to help analyze performance bottlenecks in applications by measuring execution time, memory usage, CPU load, and other resource consumption metrics.
• Browser Testing: Test performance on the latest browser versions. This should be done every major release, but if the code is updated infrequently, do it at least once a year.
• Website Accessibility: If the product is a website, run it through accessibility testing and checks to ensure the visual and audio tools will work correctly for end users. Minor code changes can greatly increase accessibility.

Team Alignment

• Conduct Retrospectives: Reflect on what went well and what didn’t in the past year.
• Update Processes: Refine workflows, whether in project management (e.g., Scrum, Kanban) or code reviews.
• Onboard New Tools: Evaluate and introduce new tools to improve productivity or collaboration, if needed.

The Flint Hills Group Resolution

Even experienced software developers benefit from checklists. The FHG development team is committed to proactive management, collaboration, documentation, and a commitment to quality. Reviewing and updating our checklists, combined with our familiarity and expertise with several popular tools, means we can stay on top of changes to serve our clients efficiently behind the scenes so all they experience is seamless performance. Resolve to schedule a call with us today.