Coding Standards Definition

Coding Standards – rules, guidelines, or conventions presented and imposed by a programming community or any organization to lead an individual towards the principles of consistency, maintenance, readability, and quality within software development. The very fact that understanding of code written, formatted, and structured as per provision of this standard tends to promote team collaboration between the developer’s team and in general improved quality software.

This will cover from practice to follow in coding, naming conventions for variables, functions, classes, commenting guidelines, error handling strategy, and even best practice on structuring and modularizing the code. Meaning thereby that the coding standard makes an improvement in the quality in the code and it will be helpful for the lesser numbers of bugs, for the increase in possibility of code reuse and ease in doing maintenance.

Moreover, coding standards are instrumental in the process of code review in that they create room for the establishment of criteria with which one would be judgmental regarding the quality of the code and the way in which the developers are to deal with the problems identified. They further play a great role in respect to the scaling of a project in that it gives consistency across different codebases and also aids in the onboarding of the new developers on understanding the code already in place.