Poor quality of coding will be ranked seventh number on the list of OWASP’s top mobile security risks and as the developer, you will be never a stranger to impossible deadlines. In a rush to get things done usually, the well-structured coding element will drop from the list of priorities which is the main reason that poor quality coding will have a very adverse impact on the application security. While there is no such set definition of poor-quality coding the quality of a piece of coding that can be judged by a few essential aspects will include the following points:
- Readability and consistency: Any option of coding that is readable as well as very well documented will be easy to understand, reviewed maintained as well and understood right from the beginning.
- Predictability, reliability, and robustness: The quality of the coding that will lead to the predictable application behavior will be helpful in mitigating the risk very easily and further will provide people with the best element of support in the security lapses.
- Maintainability as well as extensibility: Maintaining or adding the existing coding element to improve the application functionality or add the new features should be very easy which is the main reason that you need to take such aspects into account right from the beginning.
Poor quality coding is basically the piece of coding that will be scoring low on the parameters that have been mentioned above and as mobile developers, you must focus on finding yourself in the situation where it is required to add some of the functionality to the existing application and deal with the things very easily. If the coding is very well written and documented it will be easy for people to interpret and integrate the new code very easily so that there is no wastage of precious time and further there is no loss of productivity at any point in time. Some of the important factors and reasons that are responsible for the poor-quality coding have been justified as follows:
- Culture of the team: Poor working ethics, impossible deadlines, and poor technical expertise will leave the development team in technical debt and further will be creating a significant number of issues for everyone
- Week quality assurance practices into the software development life-cycle: Not performing unit or manual testing will lead to a significant number of issues in the long run and further ignorance of the importance of coding review as well as automated testing will lead to a significant number of issues in meeting the deadlines and leading to poor coding quality.
- Using the incorrect architecture: It is always very important for people to ensure that the architecture they are employing will be dealing with the code reusing in such a manner that it will be a good fit for the development as well as functional requirements without any problem. Poor quality coding is also a result of not maintaining good coding practices because any kind of inconsistency in the coding style, lack of documentation, or messy coding element will lead to a significant number of issues in the long run.
The following are the most important points to be taken care of to prevent the low-quality coding and eventually improve it:
- Maintaining the consistent coding standard: A consistent coding standard will be helpful in improving the overall visibility of the coding which is the main reason that consistent and readable coding will significantly reduce the coding complexity and prevent the development team from indulging in significant technical debt. Maintaining compatible and consistent classes in this particular case is very important for everyone so the document classes and Properties will be taken care of without any problem.
- Implementing the coding review and compliance with the best practice: It is always very important for people to focus on going for the comprehensive review of the coding consistently so that mistakes can be caught very clearly and the development phase will be sorted out. This will be helpful in eliminating the application complexity very easily and if the product has the budget, then people will be able to take advantage of the automatic test testing without any problem. Coding analysis in this particular case will be helpful in identifying the problems very easily before they merge into new code changes.
- Dealing with the legacy coding whenever the requirement is there: Refactoring will be helpful in improving the overall quality of the coding element of the CodeBase because the complexity will be eliminated and people will be able to deal with the legacy coding without any problems in the whole process.
- Establishing a good command over the memory leakage and buffer overflow issues: Memory leakage and buffer overflow issues will make sure that your coding element will be valuable to the attacks because the threat agents in this particular case will be dealing with the static analysis and other associated things. The buffers in this particular case will be dealing with the incoming buffer data without any problem so that exceeding the size of the target buffer will be sorted out and there is no chance of any kind of issues.
Apart from the points mentioned above it is definitely important for people to improve their mobile application security by paying attention to the coding element right from the very beginning because good quality coding will benefit you in multiple ways. This will provide people with a good understanding of better security of the application to the overall context very easily so that things will be smooth as well as cost-efficient in the form of software development life-cycle. This will be helpful in making sure that addressing the concerns will be very well done and you will be able to eliminate the situation of technical debt, meet the tight deadlines very easily, and overall improve the quality without any problem. This will be helpful in keeping the cost element under control without any issues and will be able to make sure that overall security will be taken care of without any hassle.
