Coding guidelines

In the previous section, we talked about why you should introduce Coding Standards. Once this is accomplished, you should consider setting up coding guidelines. Both topics sound very familiar, and indeed, they are. Yet while Coding Standards usually focus on how to format code, coding guidelines define how to write code. This, of course, includes defining which Coding Standard to use, but covers a lot more, as you will learn in this section.

What does how to write code exactly mean? Usually, there is more than one way to achieve things when writing software. Take the widely known model-view-controller (MVC) pattern, for example. It is used to divide the application logic into three types of interconnected elements – the models, the views, and the controllers. It does not explicitly define where to place the business logic, though. Should it be located inside the controllers, or rather inside the models?

There is no clear right or wrong answer to this...