Editing Procedural programming (section)

== Development practices ==

Certain [[software development]] practices are often employed with procedural programming in order to enhance quality and lower development and maintenance costs.

===Modularity and scoping===

[[modularity (programming)|Modularity]] is about organizing the procedures of a program into separate modules—each of which has a specific and understandable purpose.

Minimizing the [[scoping|scope]] of variables and procedures can enhance software quality by reducing the [[cognitive load]] of procedures and modules.

A program lacking modularity or wide scoping tends to have procedures that consume many [[variable (programming)|variable]]s that other procedures also consume. The resulting code is relatively hard to understand and to maintain.

===Sharing===

Since a procedure can specify a well-defined interface and be self-contained it supports [[code reuse]]—in particular via the [[Library (computing)|software library]].