Common Coding Standards You Should Implement

Coding standards are simply a set of principles, guidelines and rules that guide software developers on how to structure their code. It can also be considered a benchmark to measure their code base against.

Some other terms used for coding standards are “coding conventions” or “style guides”. For example, the AirBnB JavaScript style guide and the Google Style Guide.

There are two ways to look at the quality of a software product — the software itself and the code base behind it.

A good software is one that is safe and secure for users, is reliable and is expected to work in every production environment it’s meant to be in.

Coding standards ensure the above are satisfied at each point in the development process (and beyond). The bigger the project, the more necessary standards become as it’s harder to integrate new team members without an organization-wide accepted way of doing things. Besides, having complex code that is hard to maintain and reuse will increase man hours and building new software will be more costly.

This governs how your files are organized per project. This also provides instructions on how to name each file such that it can easily be indexed and sorted later on.

This helps each team member to quickly search and acquire the files and directories they need for a particular task.

Proper code indentation will help code reviewers and collaborators to easily read through the code. Thousands of lines of code without indentation can quickly irritate any reader. Properly indented code also helps the coder themselves because it’s easier to see the context of each line.

Having variable names that are meaningful will ensure each team member can easily understand code that they didn’t write themselves. This also helps the engineer make sense of the particular function or context for which that variable is being used.

In practicing TDD, the team should also have some guidelines on how to approach testing and what tools, libraries and frameworks they should use for which kind of test.

Using standardized and repeatable testing processes, the team can ensure efficient and effective correction of bugs and vulnerabilities.

Global variables are normally frowned upon in the coding community — for good reasons. Global variables can (and always will be) changed during its lifetime in the code base. Therefore, in huge code bases it’s easy to forget the correct value of this variable. This may result in hard-to-debug programs.

At any cost, projects shouldn’t have any global variables in them. But if it’s absolutely necessary, use it. But then appropriate commenting should be in place.

Properly documenting the code base will help the company and the various teams working on each project to quickly see important information about it such as:

Software engineering is no different from other engineering disciplines. Standards provide an objective measure of one’s coding skills. Understanding which areas of one’s code are weaker than the standard helps the leadership team identify training opportunities.

More importantly, the better a coder becomes at turning over quality code, the higher the value of such a coder in the team.

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