Why Coding Standards are Important
Coding standards for Java are important because they lead to greater consistency within your code and the
code of your teammates. Greater consistency leads to code that is easier to understand, which in turn
means it is easier to develop and to maintain. This reduces the overall cost of the applications that you
create.
You have to remember that your Java code will exist for a long time, long after you have moved on to other
projects. An important goal during development is to ensure that you can transition your work to another
developer, or to another team of developers, so that they can continue to maintain and enhance your work
without having to invest an unreasonable effort to understand your code. Code that is difficult to
understand runs the risk of being scrapped and rewritten – I wouldn’t be proud of the fact that my code
needed to be rewritten, would you? If everyone is doing their own thing then it makes it very difficult to
share code between developers, raising the cost of development and maintenance.
Inexperienced developers, and cowboys who do not know any better, will often fight having to follow
standards. They claim they can code faster if they do it their own way. Pure hogwash. They MIGHT be
able to get code out the door faster, but I doubt it. Cowboy programmers get hung up during testing when
several difficult-to-find bugs crop up, and when their code needs to be enhanced it often leads to a major
rewrite by them because they’re the only ones who understand their code. Is this the way that you want to
operate? I certainly do not.

At Macadamian we’ve always believed the path to enlightenment starts with a solid set of Coding Conventions.

When a project tries to adhere to common standards a few good things happen:

• programmers can go into any code and figure out what’s going on
• new people can get up to speed quickly
• people new to C++ are spared the need to develop a personal style and defend it to the death
• people new to C++ are spared making the same mistakes over and over again
• people make fewer mistakes in consistent environments
• programmers have a common enemy

Code must be formatted to agreed coding standards. Coding standards keep the code consistent and easy for the entire team to read and refactor.