We have all had this thought each day as we sign off from our development system that we have achieved functionality; our internal table data points to expected values; everything is right in the world, doves, rainbows, butterflies and heavenly music. Functionality being achieved is a very important metric for sure and one should be proud of this but in the higher order of things in an SAP Landscape, the quality of each line of code we write today, determines the effort our clients would have to put when they decide to improve or upgrade their systems. It is understood that there is a very lower chance of bugs where code quality is maintained.
If we followed code quality guidelines via SLIN or ATC checks and actively put conscious effort to ensure each line and statement conforms to best practices, there are two things happening here: first and foremost, we gain mastery over ABAP when you make the decision to replace one statement with another (another day to dwell on what these are) and secondly, you have assuredly saved time effort and cost for the client, who now can focus on code correction and improvements of a different source code (FM, Class, Reports etc…) during the system improvement activities.
It is interesting to note that we now (well for over a year or more actually) have a Clean ABAP opensource initiative, which can be a guiding star in our individual ABAP journey. The impact of this has been immense for me personally. I have been promoting these guidelines in my daily project activities among my team as part of my self improvement task. On another note, another very interesting bit of information is how this came to be as mentioned in this blog by Klaus Haeuptle.
At closing, I have to confess that I write this on the eve of a very important project milestone where we are to fix code issues to prepare landscape systems for an S/4HANA upgrade for a client. I guess I can rest peacefully knowing I have done my part to ensure some developer somewhere in the future will have one less piece of source code to worry about as you have now been onboarded and initiated into the Clean ABAP initiative.
