Best practices for code sharing

Creating a culture that prioritizes code sharing within your organization requires implementing best practices that ensure the shared code is useful, understandable, and maintainable.

Best practices include the following:

• Documenting well
• Using version control well
• Following security best practices
• Giving proper attribution or credit to the relevant creators
• Testing the code thoroughly
• Keeping to coding standards
• Abiding by continuous improvement

Here’s some more detail on each of those.

Documentation

Clear documentation is 100% needed for everyone else to understand the purpose and functionality of your code. Otherwise, it’s extremely difficult for them to use or maintain your code. Documentation can include inline comments, README files, and usage examples.

There are tools for documentation, including Sphinx (https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/) and MkDocs (https://www.mkdocs.org/)...