The Benefits Of Automated Coding Standards Enforcement

Q: Need to enforce coding standards effectively?
A: VB Law can help!

VB Law is accompanied by a sample rulebase of professional VB coding standards written by professional VB programmers and offers the following benefits through automation of the coding standards enforcement process:

Source code has consistent style and structure.

Maintenance and future development costs are reduced.

Source code is easier to read and understand.

Source code quality and robustness are improved.

Source code is less complex and easier to test.

Developers can read and understand each others code more easily.

Source code contains less defects.

Source code is easier to maintain and correct.

Development time-scales and effort are reduced.

Learning curves for new developers are reduced.

Functionality can be traced back to requirements more easily.

The Importance Of Coding Standards

Need to reduce maintenance and future development costs?
Research has shown that the initial way in which software is constructed can have a dramatic impact on the lifetime cost of software and that enforcement of coding standards early in the development process can significantly reduce maintenance and future development costs.

Need to make code easier to understand and read?
Coding standards provide a consistent structure and style for source code making it easier for different developers to read and understand each other's code. When developers leave a project and new developers take over, the new developers will find it easier to understand the code if it has a consistent style and structure.

The Difficulties Of Coding Standards Enforcement

Many organisations construct and document coding standards but have great difficulty in enforcing those standards. Paper coding standards soon become worthless if they cannot be enforced and the time and effort spent creating them is lost.

Self-checking and peer code reviews represent the common means by which code is reviewed for coding standards compliance. Unfortunately self-checking can lead to developers neglecting, or implementing their own flavour of coding standards. Lack of commitment to peer code reviews due to insufficient time and resource can also lead to non-compliant source code.

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