Browse > Home / Technology / More Than Practice

More Than Practice

April 11, 2008

Yesterday, my fellow colleague Jeff Morris gave a great presentation on development best practices. Since we had a small group, the presentation quickly turned into a fun and engaging discussion as we exchanged stories and thoughts.

Topics covered:

  • Logging – Be sure to capture those pesky errors and handle them with style.
  • Testing – Trust your code, but verify that trust.
  • Comments – They are only as helpful as you make them!
  • Reviews – Review the application’s functionality, logic, and code as often as possible.
  • Consistency – Use templates and standards.
  • Development Process – It’s important to have a method to the madness.
  • Documentation – Try to make something that will stay alive.

Ignoring these practices will undoubtedly cause a lot of pain and headaches. It is also important to be realistic and remember that constraints (time, money etc…) can make following all of these practices extremely difficult.

When it comes to best practices, the list could go on and on.  Each one of these practices represent a building block for success.  In summary, creating a solid application requires solid development practices.

Written by JoshWolf · Filed Under Technology 

Comments

One Response to “More Than Practice”

  1. Jodie on April 11th, 2008 3:41 pm

    I’m a big fan of Jeff’s and of coding standards. The best standards are those that are easy to remember and implement and seem so obvious. What always surprises me is the number of people who continue to reinvent the wheel without any consistency to the way they’ve done things in the past. Why not stick with what works? I’m absolutely for innovation, but there should be some areas that don’t change.

    Final thought…if you want to keep your users happy when using a list in your website, please remember the following: the headers shouldn’t go away when I scroll down the page and every list should be sortable.

Got something to say?