How We Get Coding Standards Wrong

The other day, I sat in on a meeting where a large-ish group was discussing “standards” for their particular area of software development. I have the word standards in quotes because, by design, there wasn’t a clear definition as to what sorts of standards they would be; it was an open-ended exercise. The standard could cover anything from variable casing to development practices and principles to holistic approaches. When asked for my input, I was sort of bemused by the process, and I said that I didn’t really have much in the way of an answer. I declined to elaborate much more on that since I wasn’t interested in derailing the meeting in any way, but it did get me to thinking about why the exercise seemed sort of futile to me.

I generally have a natural leeriness when it comes to coding and development standards and especially activities designed to flesh those out, and in this post I’d like to explore why. It isn’t that I don’t believe standards should exist or that I believe they aren’t important. It’s just that I think we frequently miss the point and create standards out of some sense that it’s The Right Thing, and thus create standards that are pointless or even detrimental.

Standards by Committee Anti-Pattern

One problem with defining standards in a group setting is that any group containing some socially savvy people is going to gravitate toward diplomacy. Contentious and arbitrary subjects (so-called “religious wars”) like camel case versus Pascal case or where the bracket after a function goes will be avoided in favor or things upon which a consensus may be reached. But think about what’s actually happening–everyone’s agreeing that the things that everyone already does should be standardized. This is a fairly vacuous exercise in bureaucracy, useful only in the hypothetical realm where a new person comes on board and happens to disagree with something upon which twenty others agree.

People doing this are solving a problem that doesn’t exist: “how do we make sure everyone does this the same way when everyone’s currently doing it the same way?” It also tends to favor documenting current process rather than thinking critically about ideal process.

Let’s capture all of the stuff that we all do and write it down. Okay, so, coding standards. When working on a .NET project, first drive to the office. Then, have your keycard ready to get in the building. Next, enter the building…

Obviously this is silly, but hopefully the point hits home. The simple fact that you do something or that everyone in the group does something doesn’t mean that it’s worth capturing as trainable knowledge and enforcing on the group. And yet this is a direction I frequently see groups take as they get into a groove of “yes, and” when discussing standards. It can just turn into “let’s make a list of everything we do.”

Pointless Homogeneity

The concept of capturing the intersection of everyone’s approach and coding style dovetails into another problem with groups hashing out standards: a group-think bias. Slightly different from the notion that everything common should be documented, this is the notion that everything should be common. For instance, I once worked in a shop where developers were all mandated to use the same diff tool. I’m not kidding. If anyone bothered with a justification for this, I don’t recall what it was, other than some nod to pointless standards.

CookieCutter

You can take this pretty far. Imagine demands that you use the same syntax highlighting colors as your peers or that you keep your file system organized in the same way as everyone else. What does this have to do with the code you’re producing? Who knows…

It might seem like the kind of thing where you should just indulge the the harmless control freak driving it or the group that dreams it up as a unit, but this runs the risk of birthing a toxic culture. With everything, however inconsequential, homogenized, there is no room for creative thinkers to innovate with new approaches.

Make-Work Tasks

Another risk you run when coming up with standards is to create so-called standards that amount to codifying and mandating busy-work. I’ve made my evolving opinion of comments in code quite clear on a few occasions, and I consider them to be an excellent example. When you make “comment every method” a standard, you’re standardizing the procedure (mindlessly adding comments) and not the goal (clarity and communication).

There are plenty of other examples one might dream up. The silly mandate of “sort and organize usings” that I blogged about some time back comes to mind. This is another example of standardizing pointless make-work tasks that provide no substantive benefit. In all cases, the problem is that you’re not only asking developers to engage in brainless busy-work–you’re codifying it as an official mandate.

Getting Too Specific

Another source of issues that I’ve seen in the establishment of standards is a tendency to get too specific. “What sort of convention should we use when we declare a generic interface below an enumeration inside of a nested class?” Really? Does that come up often enough that it’s important for everyone to get on the same page about how to approach it?

I recognize the human desire for set closure; we don’t like it when a dresser is missing a drawer or when we haven’t collected the whole set, but sometimes you’ve just got to let it go. We’re not the IRS–it’s going to be alright if there are contingencies that we haven’t covered and oddball loopholes that we haven’t addressed.

Missing the Point

For me, this is the biggest one. Usually standards discussions are about superficial programming concerns rather than substantive ones, and that’s unfortunate. It is the aforementioned camel vs Pascal case wars or whether to put brackets and which kinds to use. To var or not to var? Should constants be all caps? If an interface is in a forest and doesn’t have an “I” in front of its name, is it still an interface?

I understand the benefit of consistency in naming, casing, and other syntactic considerations. I really do, in spite of my tendency to be dismissive and iconoclast on this front when discussing them. But, first off, let’s not pretend that there really is a right way with these things–there’s just the way that you’re used to doing them. And, more importantly, let’s not pretend that this is really all that important in the grand scheme of things.

We use consistent casing and naming so that a reader of the code can tell at a glance whether something is a field or a local variable or whether something is a method or a property or a constant. It’s really about promoting readability, which, in turn, is about maximizing maintainability. But you know what’s much harder on maintainability than Jones’s great constant casing blunder of 2010 where he forgot to use ALL CAPS? Writing bad code.

If you’re banging out behemoth methods with control statements eight deep, all of the camel case in the world isn’t going to make your code readable. A standard mandating that all such methods be prepended with “yuck” might help, but the real thing that you need is some standards about writing clean code. Keeping methods and classes small and focused, principles like DRY and SOLID, and other good design principles are much more important standards to which to aspire, but they’re often less concrete and harder to enforce. It’s much easier and more rote for a code reviewer to look for casing issues or missing comments than to analyze code for good software practice and object-oriented design. The latter is often less cut-and-dry and more a matter of degrees, so it’s frequently glossed over in favor of more tangible, simple things. Problem is, those tangible, simple things really aren’t all that important to the health of your applications and projects over the long haul.

It’s All Just Premature Optimization

The common thread here is that all of these standards anti-patterns result from solving non-existent problems. If you have some collection of half-baked standards at your company that go on for some pages and then say, “after that, follow the Microsoft standards,” imagine how they came about. I bet a few of the group’s original engineers or most senior people had a conversation that went something like, “We should probably have some standards.” “Yeah, I guess… but why now?” “I dunno… I think it’s, like, what you’re supposed to do.”

I suspect that if you did a survey, a lot more standards documents have started with conversations like that than with conversations about hours lost to maintenance and difficulty reading code. They are born out of cargo-cult practice rather than a necessity to solve some problem. Philosophically, they start as solutions in search of a problem rather than solutions to actual problems.

The situation is complicated by the fact that adoption of certain standards may have solved real problems in the past for developers on the team, and they’re simply doing the smart thing and carrying their knowledge forward. The trouble is that not all projects face the same problems. When discussing approaches, start with abstract and general abiding principles like SOLID and DRY and take it from there. If half of your team uses camel case and the other half Pascal and it’s causing communication and maintenance difficulties, flip a coin and set a standard. Repeat as necessary with other standards to keep the project moving and humming. But don’t make them up just for the sake of doing so. You wouldn’t start writing random code that may never solve any actual problem, so why create a standard that way?