Development guidelines and coding standards

When you are developing a project component for THE CODING MACHINE, your component will be integrated into a larger project. It is very important for the project manager to be able to fully understand your code in order to integrate it with others components.

Furthermore, a good code is not only a code that works, but a code that is also easy to extend, maintain and debug. Because of the nature of THE CODING MACHINE projects, it is very likely that other people will work on your code and maintain your code. Looking through your code should therefore be easy. This is why we need coding standards.

While defining THE CODING MACHINE coding standards, we focused on the following principles:

• Readability: Adopting a readable and maintainable code.This implies to specifically state the modules functions and the exact meanings of inputs and outputs.
• Testability: Coding components that are easy to test.
• Simplicity: Focusing on making components simple.
• Portability: As far as technically possible, the code should be portable and not depend on a specific platform or program version.
• Widely adopted: It is not THE CODING MACHINE intent to invent the wheel of coding standards. Coding standards are a constraint for developers and we don't want developers to spend hours learning weird standards. THE CODING MACHINE code relies on "common sense" and widely adopted standards.