Poor quality of coding will be on the 7th number of the OWASP list of top 10 mobile security risks. As a developer it is very important for people to focus on the deadlines and usually developers to chase the deadlines eliminate the concept of well-structured coding and get the things done as soon as possible. On the other hand, this leads to significant compromises in quality and eventually leads to significant issues in mobile application security. As of now, there is no definition for the poor quality of coding but the quality of a piece of code that can be justified by a few essential aspects has been justified as follows:
- Readability and consistency: Any option that is not at all properly read will be a poor-quality coding element which is the main reason that people have to focus on improving the readability and very well-documented coding element so that everything is easy to understand, review, understand, and maintain distance.
- Predictability, reliability, and robustness: The quality of the coding that will lead to predictable application behavior and also will commit the risk of hidden issues can lead to security lapse which is the main reason that taking it very seriously is important.
- Maintainability and extensibility: Maintaining or including the existing coding element in improving the application functionality is very important and this will improve the overall concept of mobile application coding security systems very well.
As a developer, it is very important for people to take the concept of mobile security very seriously and for this, they have to function with proper awareness of things so that everything will be very well sorted out right from the beginning. If the coding is very well documented and written it will be easy to integrate with the new options and if this is not the case then there will be a lot of waste of the precious time of the organizations which will further reduce productivity. The following are the most important points to be taken into account to prevent low coding quality and ultimately improve the basic quality of the coding and app protection:
- Maintaining the consistent coding standards: Consistent coding standards will be definitely helpful in improving the overall reliability of the coding and further any kind of coding element that is consistent and readable will significantly reduce the complexity. This will be helpful in implementing the development team from any kind of technical debt and further will be able to ensure that compatible and consistent classes along with variables and methods will be very well prevented. Document classes, properties, and complex blocks of the coding will be based upon clear and concise comments so that reusable will be sorted out and the complexity will be perfectly elevated from the whole process.
- Implementing the coding review policy: It is always important for the organization to focus on introducing the analysis and review of the coding very consistently so that everyone will be able to analyze the mistakes in between very easily and further, will be able to ensure that there will be no wastage of time. If any product has the budget, then definitely you should focus on manual testing systems in the whole process so that things are very well done in the right direction. In addition to this, every organization should focus on coding analysis tools so that identification of the potential problems will be very successfully done and there is no chance of any kind of merging into the new coding changes at any point in time. In addition to this focusing on re-factoring is definitely important because it will improve the overall quality of the coding base and also helps in reducing the complexity without any problem throughout the process.
- Establishing the priority over the memory leaks: Memory leaks and buffer overflow will definitely make your coding element very valuable to the attacks which is the main reason that as a threat agent, you need to have a good understanding of the static analysis and detection of the issues so that things are very well done in the whole process. This will be definitely helpful in making sure that incoming buffer data will be sorted out and there will be no chance of any kind of situation exceeding the size of the target buffer at any point in time. Eventually, this will be helpful in streamlining the operations of the company and further, the security issues will be perfectly analyzed right from the beginning without any problem in the whole process.
Some of the common reasons responsible for the poor quality of coding have been justified as follows:
- Culture-related issues are very much common in organisations which eventually are the reason behind the poor coding element. If the work ethics of the organisations are poor, deadlines are impossible and the technical expertise is also poor then definitely the development teams will be always in the problem of managing the technical situation.
- If any organization is facing the problem of very weak quality assurance practices in the software development life-cycle then also the entire situation will be very problematic to be managed which is the main reason that people need to focus on the review of the coding simultaneously along with automated testing to improve the quality.
- If the organizations are using the wrong architecture, then also people need to have a good understanding of the employment of the things in the right manner so that everything will be done as a good fit for the development and functional requirements without any problem.
In addition to the points mentioned above it is always important for people to have a good understanding of the basics of app code protection so that everything will be proficiently done in the right direction and organizations will be able to have very smooth and cost-efficient software development life-cycle based upon genuine quality of coding.
