Conventions may be formalized in a documented set of rules that an entire team or company follows,[1] or may be as informal as the habitual coding practices of an individual.
Code that is written using consistent guidelines is easier for other reviewers to understand and assimilate, improving the efficacy of the defect detection process.
Specific styles, irrespective of whether they are commonly adopted, do not automatically produce good quality code.
[4] The management of complexity includes the following basic principle: minimize the amount of code written during the project development.
Software is often refactored to bring it into conformance with a team's stated coding standards after its initial release.
Special tags within source code comments are often used to process documentation, two notable examples are javadoc and doxygen.
Some of the growth of this class of development tools stems from increased maturity and sophistication of the practitioners themselves (and the modern focus on safety and security), but also from the nature of the languages themselves.
All software practitioners must grapple with the problem of organizing and managing a large number of sometimes complex instructions.
For all but the smallest software projects, source code (instructions) are partitioned into separate files and frequently among many directories.
As software development shifted from purely procedural programming (such as found in FORTRAN) towards more object-oriented constructs (such as found in C++), it became the practice to write the code for a single (public) class in a single file (the 'one class per file' convention).
In the example above, while is missing its second argument, its action (because the Tcl also uses the newline character to delimit the end of a command).