Coding Standards In Business

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Coding standards, sometimes referred to as programming styles or coding conventions, are a very important asset to programmers. Unfortunately, they are often overlooked by junior as well as some program developers due to the fact that many of the recommended coding standards do not actually affect the compilation of the code itself, a concept that we will focus on later. This report shall try to demonstrate the importance of coding standards, and why they have already become a common practice for businesses and programming language developers alike. I shall begin with a definition of coding standards. In general they are a set of standards and guidelines which are/should be used when writing the source code for a program. Standards are rules …show more content…

For the COBOL programmer for example, commenting code (an area of coding standards which will be explained later) would be significantly less important than in other languages, as it is possible to make COBOL self documenting. It also may not be important for a company that is not going to be continually producing software and it may be more time consuming than just building the software without. However, in open source software, the importance of coding standards cannot be emphasised enough. The most prominent example of this is Mozilla Firefox, the open source internet browser which makes all its code freely available online. This is so other developers can look over the source code, possibly identifying possible security flaws/bugs in the code as well as extending the code. It would be extremely difficult for other developers to identify potential flaws in the program if it did not follow a particular style convention. Also, Firefox has a huge database of extensions, some of which it created itself but many of which were created by external developers. External extensions would be very difficult to understand and integrate into Firefox if they did not follow a coding standard, and Firefox may not have been such a popular internet browser as it is …show more content…

They can make a great difference when maintaining software. Maintenance is arguably the most important step in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and is definitely the most recurring. When the developers who are responsible for maintaining the code are different from the ones who produced it, it relies on them understanding code developed by another developer. With the lack of a coding standard, this task would be extremely different because the majority of programmers have their own programming style which is often difficult to follow by anyone with the exception of the original developer. Having a coding standard however, means that all software programmers will be easily able to read and understand all the code for a program, as long as it conforms to the coding standard and the developer who is maintaining the code is familiar with it, making it easily maintained and modify if

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