Essentials of Software Engineering, 5th Edition

9.2 Characteristics of a Good Implementation

It is always a good idea to keep in mind the following characteristics that should be found in a good implementation:

• Readability: The code can be easily read and understood by other programmers.

• Maintainability: The code can be easily modified and maintained. Note that this is related to readability, but it is not exactly the same; for example, this involves the use of Hungarian notation, first put forward by Charles Simonyi of Microsoft (Simonyi 1976), in which variable names include abbreviations for the type of variable.

• Performance: All other things being equal, the implementation should produce code that performs as fast as possible.

• Traceability: All code elements should correspond to a design ...