Sunday, October 12, 2008
Enterprise Architecture and Coding Standards
Pretty much every enterprise has something they label as coding standards for each language they use and therefore enterprise architects believe that they don't need to pay attention to them. Nothing could be further from the truth...
Ask yourself, is it a best practice or worst practice to impose coding standards from one language on another, e.g. requiring variables to be declared at the beginning of a method in Java, because that's how you do it in C.
Every method should have a header comment describing all parameters, callers, and callees which of course causes code bloat and massive header expansion. Over time, the more code that needs to be parsed results in longer cycles for compilation which results in more resource usage which results in increased server and desktop costs and slower release cycles to deliver valuable working software.
Worrying more about the placement of braces than about the clarity of the code. How many code reviews focus on esthetics vs structure? Does the hacker who wants to steal data from your web application really care about curlies? I bet they do care about the lack of developers paying attention to security such that they can exploit SQL injection, cross-site scripting, etc.
| | View blog reactionsAsk yourself, is it a best practice or worst practice to impose coding standards from one language on another, e.g. requiring variables to be declared at the beginning of a method in Java, because that's how you do it in C.
Every method should have a header comment describing all parameters, callers, and callees which of course causes code bloat and massive header expansion. Over time, the more code that needs to be parsed results in longer cycles for compilation which results in more resource usage which results in increased server and desktop costs and slower release cycles to deliver valuable working software.
Worrying more about the placement of braces than about the clarity of the code. How many code reviews focus on esthetics vs structure? Does the hacker who wants to steal data from your web application really care about curlies? I bet they do care about the lack of developers paying attention to security such that they can exploit SQL injection, cross-site scripting, etc.
