Coding Standards

Coding Standard can be described as a set of rules, guidelines or conventions that a given programming community or organization uses to dictate how programming should be done with a view of making the code as readable and maintainable as possible. These standards help in the enhancement of code readability and hence enhance the coordination of the teams and the quality of the software that is developed.

Coding standards are the rules that apply to the source code and its appearance; these encompass, inter alia, the conventions for naming variables, functions, and classes, the guidelines for commenting and documenting the code, error handling, and code layout and arrangement. Hence following these standards developers can prevent the occurrence of bugs, make it possible to use code to a certain extent again and reduce the time and resources needed for the maintenance of the code.

Nevertheless, coding standard is one of the factors which are applied in code reviews since it describes a set of rules applied in code evaluation and problem solving. They are also good at project scaling as they assist in ensuring that there is consistency of code across different repositories and also assists new comer in the team to understand the code in the project.