In the field of software development, there is
always a case, where a software project is needed to be expanded day by day. As
the software functionality grows, the most important task of development
process becomes to be maintaining the existing code and at the same time adding
more functionality to it. Thus here coding standards play an important role.
What happens if the standards are not maintained?
The code becomes difficult to read and understand. That means if one developer
leaves maintaining a codebase and another developer tries to continue
development from where previous developer left, or in another case a developer
tries to read his own code after long time. If the code is a mess. It would be
the most difficult to maintain and continue development. As a result either we
have to leave that codebase and it also results in loss of time and money, we
have invested on that software codebase.
Every language has some standards to write and
comment code, so that it becomes easy to read, understand and develop further.
Coding Standards includes following things:
· Comments to be
added for each function working code blocks
· Maintaining a code
structure, such as hierarchy and proper spacing
· Easy to understand
and use File Structure
· Re-using the
repeating code blocks
· Documentation for
functioning of code blocks and function parameters
· Modular approach
for development, so that it is easy to add/remove functionality
· Properly sanitizing
user input data, then processing in efficient way
As an example, PHP language has some coding
standards. Most popular of them is PEAR standard for coding and documentation.
That includes file revision, author, package and software version number. It
also helps to mention depreciated functions, so that users should be aware and
these are going to be removed in next versions.
To Learn more about PHP’s PEAR standard
visit: http://pear.php.net/manual/en/standards.php
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