Functional Code Standards

The next deeper level of standards, and the one that is close to the code itself, concerns making decisions about how the actual functionality is implemented. This chapter focuses on the options and decisions that are most likely to have a significant impact if they were changed after a substantial amount of code was already written. Implied in that description is the idea that making changes to them after development has started introduces risks of breaking changes, or at least a significant amount of rework that could be avoided by making the right decision from the start, for whatever value of right applies.

Alongside those are some general best practices that are less risk-prone, but that will make the lives of those working with the code, or maintaining it, easier. Taken together, there are a half dozen topics in this set. These may not be the only decision points that can affect a project or the ongoing efforts of an engineering team across multiple...