Development Best Practices

General Remarks

This is a living document, and can change over time. If there is something you think the team should adopt, then please do raise it.

Coding Conventions

We try to match the Software Team as best we can. You can find the current coding standards here.

Boy Scout Rules

“Always leave the code you are working on a little bit better than you found it.”

Best practices emerge over time, we get better over time.

When making changes, take a look around the rest of the method/file for anything that may benefit from a quick update.

As we get better at writing RDMP code, we might find things we can make more readable, faster, or just in-step with out coding standards. Making these small changes as we find them keeps the code clean, and prevents the dreaded “Reafactor these files” tickets.

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly

As with all things worth doing, doing it badly is better than not doing it at all.

While this isn't an invitation to ship bad features over no features, it is an invitation to as much as you can, rather than not do any of it because you feel you can’t do it all.

For example, it’s better to write a test that covers 10% of the code change rather than not write a test at all.

It Probably needs a test

Have you ever asked yourself “Does this need a test?”? Congratulations, you’ve answered your own question, it does!