Coding standards without control?

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martinig
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Coding standards without control?

Post by martinig »

A recent poll asked if programming standards are used by development organisations... and if they are controlled.

None: 20%
Yes, but without control: 49%
Yes, with control: 31%

Participants: 369

Source: Methods & Tools (http://www.methodsandtools.com)

A majority of the participating organisations have coding standards... and a majority does not control them ;o) What is the situation at your location? Does this lack of control really hurt?
timvw
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Post by timvw »

Problems arise when you have to interface with codebases that have different coding standards... So we decided for a best-effort instead of strict policy...
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Jenk
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Post by Jenk »

My enterprise experience, as minimal as it is, was no standard, providing it was legible and comprehensible. No one line wonders, etc.

My own code is of course immaculate and anyone that can't read it are just blind :P

Other that, my only experience is Open Source project contributions, which all have very, very strict control. A lot of them will refuse your contribution, no matter how marvellous it is, if the coding standards are not strictly adhered to.
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BDKR
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Post by BDKR »

It does certainly seem to depend on the size of the organization. A couple of the smaller organizations I've interviewed with in the last couple of months didn't seem to really care. The larger organizations are of course a completely different story. But those with a good number of developers really do have to do something to
keep things consistent.
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CoderGoblin
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Post by CoderGoblin »

A few of the companies I have worked for (either as an employee or as part of a consultant's role) performed a code review as part of the "testing" phase. This code review was carried out by a person who had little or no contact to the code previously although was a coder themselves. The result was frequently a case of "more annotation required :wink:" although on occasion it did highlight other problems/more efficient ways to do things. Very rarely did any coding standards come into play. It was more a case of is it readable and is it understandable when we come back to the code in a years time.
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