Overview

The goal of the coding or programming activity is to implement the design in the best possible manner. The coding activity affects both testing and maintenance profoundly. As we saw earlier, the time spent in coding is a small percentage of the total software cost, while testing and maintenance consume the major percentage. Thus, it should be clear that the goal during coding should not be to reduce the implementation cost, but the goal should be to reduce the cost of later phases, even if it means that the cost of this phase has to increase. In other words, the goal during this phase is not to simplify the job of the programmer. Rather, the goal should be to simplify the job of the tester and the maintainer.

This distinction is important, as programmers are often concerned about how to finish their job quickly, without keeping the later phases in mind. During coding, it should be kept in mind that the programs should not be constructed so that they are easy to write, but so that they are easy to read and understand. A program is read a lot more often and by a lot more people during the later phases.

There are many different criteria for judging a program, including readability, size of the program, execution time, and required memory. Having readability and understandability as a clear objective of the coding activity can itself help in producing software that is more maintainable. A famous experiment by...