Convincing a team to prioritize code quality requires clear communication of its long-term benefits. Share real-world examples of how poor code quality led to costly setbacks or project delays, emphasizing the risks of technical debt. Highlight the cost-effectiveness of investing in quality upfront, as it reduces maintenance efforts, minimizes bugs, and ensures scalability. Introduce practices like code reviews to foster a culture of collaboration and improvement, encouraging knowledge sharing and accountability. Focus on how high-quality code enhances team efficiency, accelerates delivery, and builds a foundation for sustainable growth, ultimately benefiting everyone involved.

Introduce Automated Tools: Propose using tools like linters, code analyzers, and CI/CD pipelines to enforce quality without adding excessive manual overhead.

It’s very empirical with almost all the developers that considering project timelines, code quality deteriorates. Few things, I have found helpful in maintaining the code quality are: 1. Code reviews: In each code review emphasize not only functional/technical implementation, but also best practices that need to be followed and understood by any other team members. It helps in better readability and maintainability of code. 2. Share experience: Sharing your own experience with the team members is important in the context. e.g. poorly named variables or code without annotations takes time to understand and debug. Most importantly, it is difficult to make any changes in the code. It helps team to learn and instates rightly.

— explain operational benefits in running and debugging good quality software. — implement code quality gates to pass CI/CD

Convincing a team to prioritize code quality starts with demonstrating its long-term benefits. Highlight how clean, maintainable code reduces bugs, simplifies future development, and minimizes technical debt, saving time and effort. Share real-world examples or metrics showing how poor code quality has caused delays or failures. Encourage team discussions to address concerns and align on goals. Finally, lead by example, advocating for small, achievable improvements, such as implementing code reviews or automated testing.

Analyzing your repositories to identify rework and understanding whether your team spends most of their time on new development or bug fixes is a straightforward way to prioritize code quality. When the team realizes they’re losing valuable opportunities to learn and work on new challenges because of recurring issues, they’ll naturally gravitate toward tools and processes that improve code quality. AI now makes it easier than ever to write better code and ensure it aligns with organizational standards. By making these processes seamless, frictionless, and free of blame, you can integrate them into the SDLC as a natural, self-sustaining part of your development workflow.

I provide examples of how poor code can cause major problems. I also show how maintaining high-quality code can save time and money over time. Clean and maintainable code benefits future development and helps teams work together better. I encourage regular code reviews and automated testing to create a culture of continuous improvement.