What Are Best Practices?
The software development industry has and will continue to develop high-quality software; but unfortunately the industry still carries the stigma of countless spectacular software failures. Software development best practices, methodologies and processes are intended to deliver software development projects on time and within budget, and have been documented and taught for the past few decades. Some of the key best practices include:
• Requirements definitions that are agreed to by all parties—business analysts, marketing, development, quality assurance
• Coding standards adherence
• Unit testing by developers: test early and often
• Change and version control for all software
• Automated and manual testing—functional, integration, performance, security, regression
• Deployment—monitoring and maintenance for post-production feedback

Most important to these best practices is a quality mindset, whereby quality is built into each line of code; and at each step of the development process, issues are addressed so that they are not passed downstream.

Companies may have invested in extensive Java software development systems and processes that utilize these best practices, or they may have installed a few simple Open Source development tools—yet many still have not achieved the level of code quality the end user expects. With maintenance costs exceeding 90 percent of IT budgets, there is a great deal of room for improvement.

Which Tools Can Help Enforce Best Practices?
During the act of software creation, various Java development tools have emerged to help even the best developers do a better job, whether they work on a team or alone. These tools can be considered best practices in that they are designed to help in most situations. Once developers have used them, they will find coding without them difficult, at best. These tools include:
• Source code control systems
• Static code checking software
• Testing frameworks
• Coverage tools

In Part II of this article, I will take an in-depth look at the benefits of implementing Java development tools, including source code control systems, static code checking software, testing frameworks and coverage tools. And examine how these tools will enable development teams to focus on quality early in the development cycle to help increase the efficiency of the development team.