Book: Software Engineering at Google
Chapter 8: Style Guides and Rules
Summary:
Having coding rules within an organisation is crucial and important.
Rules encourage "good" behaviours and discourage "bad" behaviours. The "good" and "bad" can be subjective and varies between organisations, depending on what they care about.
Some examples of rules are code formatting, name and location of source files (folder structures) and naming and patterns of methods and variables.
Rules ensure that there is a common vocabulary of coding between the engineers within the same organisation.
When creating rules, focus on the goals instead of simply picking which rules should the organisation have.
Identifying rules that will be serving the goals will ensure that they are not redundant.
Not everything should become a rule as this will make it challenging and time consuming for engineers to remember and maintain the rule set.
Rules should be easy to understand for the readers.
Rules should be consistent.
Rules should ensure that there are no error-prone and surprising constructs as these can be easily misused and introduce bugs.
Rules should be practical.
Style guides are a set of rules to help engineers avoid dangers, enforce best practices and ensure consistency.
Style guides are not static, they can change with time.
If a new language version is released, rules should be updated to allow or exclude new features and idioms.
Rules and style guides can be enforce through teaching and training or with tooling.
It is best for engineers to use automated tools to check for compliance instead of relying on engineer-based verification.
Automation also ensures that rules are not dropped or forgotten as time passes.
Automation will also minimise the variance in how a rule is interpreted and applied.
Book: Software Engineering at Google Chapter 8: Style Guides and Rules
Summary:
Having coding rules within an organisation is crucial and important.
When creating rules, focus on the goals instead of simply picking which rules should the organisation have.
Style guides are a set of rules to help engineers avoid dangers, enforce best practices and ensure consistency.
Style guides are not static, they can change with time.
Rules and style guides can be enforce through teaching and training or with tooling.