This healthcheck has to your first step toward building a better software for startups. It helped me to build a couple of successful MVPs and this guidelines is guiding me on every tech decision.

How to execute the healthcheck:

1. Grab your dev team and book a 2 hour meeting. Don’t include business partners or other stakeholders, it has to be internal meeting just for devs. Get an outside facilitator if you have no senior leader who can lead the meeting.
2. As a team, go through every point and evaluate it on scale from 1 to 10. Note your answers. If you are not sure what some rule means - google that, make sure you understand every word from the doc.
3. During the discussion collect action points, especially when something is having score less than 4.
4. Calculate the average score, combine your action points into single action plan and send it to your stakeholders.

Development

Code is clean if it can be understood easily – by everyone on the team. Clean code can be read and enhanced by a developer other than its original author. With understandability comes readability, changeability, extensibility and maintainability.

General rules

1. Follow standard conventions. Have convention for naming, functions length, quotes, etc. Utilize Linker to control the quality.
2. Keep it simple stupid. Simpler is always better. Reduce complexity as much as possible.
3. Boy scout rule. Leave the campground cleaner than you found it.
4. Always find root cause. Always look for the root cause of a problem. Don’t do quick fixes, avoid IFs.

Design rules

1. Keep configurable data at high levels.
2. Prefer polymorphism to if/else or switch/case.
3. Prevent over-configurability.
4. Use dependency injection.