One of the virtues of programming that I have found very useful and have been trying to discipline myself to use is what I like to call complete coding. This is the practice of writing shipping quality code ALL the time.

Most programmers try out an algorithm or put a thought into code very quickly to test the idea. There are two major problems with this practice. All too often the code ends up not being cleaned up and sits in the live project until somebody happens to find a bug in it. Or, the code gets tested in its quick and dirty form, then cleaned up, and checked in without further testing. Both of these practices put bugs into the code when they don’t need to be there. (The bugs are just a result of sloppy procedures and are fairly easy to avoid.)

So with these thoughts in mind, I have a few recommendations to make to programmers (myself included).

1- Always write error handling code as you are writing the main code paths. If you don’t it probably won’t get done, and it will be a while before the bugs get found since those error code paths by definition don’t get executed during normal operation.

2- Always write the code in such a way that you can understand it easily. If you have to think about it to write it, you will have to think about it to maintain it. And most importantly, it will be much more difficult to be sure you wrote it correctly the first time. (Thinking is just too darn hard, he he.)

3- Consider reuse of the code in the initial writing. Sometimes this means hiding implementation details behind an interface. Sometimes it means doing the refactoring work NOW, even though you desperately want to just finish the piece of code you’re working on.

4- Always run through the code in your head (or even better, in a debugger) with sample input to make sure the code is complete. Think about the what-ifs (the things you never think will happen, but sooner or later they will).

Well, there are probably many more, which is why there’s entire books about this subject. But these are few that I have noticed as being extremely useful. Let me know if you have other “complete coding” practices that others could benefit from.