Having been involved in coding standards discussions at several jobs I've usually found the process to be an arbitrary exercise in codifying personal opinion. The conversation inevitably turns to pedantic things such as where to put curly braces or how to indent. I've started to think about how to try to focus teams on higher value areas of software engineering, and how to design coding standards to focus teams in these areas. This post is the product of those thoughts, written as a coding standards document. Coding standards Preface The purpose of this document is to describe some software development practices. The topics are ordered according to their relative importance to our organization. Where critical, firm rules are specified; elsewhere the standards are intentionally relaxed so you have the freedom to express your personal preference. This document is intended to be a helpful tool that improves the quality of the engineering of our organization. It is not inte...