Code quality metrics: How to evaluate and improve your code

Code quality is a crucial metric for evaluating the overall health of software, focusing on aspects like maintainability, reliability, and robustness. High-quality code is characterized by efficiency, reliability, readability, and the ability to handle errors effectively, making it easier to maintain and expand with new features. As development teams frequently modify codebases, maintaining code quality becomes challenging, often leading to gradual degradation. To address this, both quantitative metrics, such as code coverage and lines of code per function, and qualitative measures, like adherence to coding standards and descriptive naming, are essential for assessing code quality. Regular code reviews facilitate learning, ensure adherence to best practices, and help detect unnoticed issues. Integrating code quality checks into continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines using tools like ESLint, Pylint, and SonarQube helps automate these processes, ensuring high code quality. Such practices lead to reduced technical debt, fewer bugs, and lower development costs, ultimately streamlining the software development process.