Tag Archives: Coding Standards

Uncle Bob On Coding Standards

It’s important for a team to have a single coding standard for each language to avoid several problems:

  • A lack of standards can make your code unreadable.
  • Disagreement over standards can cause check-in wars between developers.
  • Seeing different standards in the same class can be extremely irritating.

UncleBob wrote this:

On coding standards:

  • Let them evolve during the first few iterations.
  • Let them be team specific instead of company specific.
  • Don’t write them down if you can avoid it. Rather, let the code be the way the standards are captured.
  • Don’t legislate good design. (e.g. don’t tell people not to use goto)
    Make sure everyone knows that the standard is about communication, and nothing else.
  • After the first few iterations, get the team together to decide.

Original article