Businesses definitely need to have some standards in place around coding, including guidelines (not laws) about indenting, and other questions of visual style.

Did you actually quantify the benefit of your coding standard? At the end of the year, how much more profit did your company made because of the coding standard? How did you measure that? If productivity really went up, did you let programmers go, because you now need less of them?

Suggestions welcome. How do you quantify something like this? Has anyone tried?

I guess one way to try and quantify this would be to think back at how much time was spent trying to remember what your intention was for various pieces of code before you then had to go and explain that same code to junior members of your team.

I remember several years ago, I wrote a code generating SED script, that I thought was really clever. It was virtually unreadable (all symbols, etc.) and contained zero comments. I didn't write it for production, but as a utility for my own use. It was cool and I was really proud of myself, but I would have deserved to be fired if I even thought about putting it into production like that. And if it were intended for production use, then I would not have changed a line of code, but I would have commented the heck out of it.

Where I found a lack of standards, I've tried to discipline myself - I've used a specific exit code pattern for abends such that someone else maintaining my code in the future could easily see the pattern and add a new abend exit code as needed.

In reply to Re^2: Seeking Best Practices - does your company follow a standard? by dineed
in thread Seeking Best Practices - does your company follow a standard? by meraxes

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