3 methods to record your best coding practices

To produce sustainable source code and avoid technical debt, developers must align their coding practices to keep consistency and ensure code quality. Methodologies like pair programming or code reviews are great ways to achieve that purpose.

However, when organizations have multiple teams working independently, these have limitations :

• It gets complex to discuss and share best practices across teams
• In case of turnover for a developer, she might need additional time to adapt to her new team’s best practices if they are very different from her previous team
• Lack of knowledge may have consequences you don’t want: code defects, bugs, …
• Access to an organization best practices is complex during the onboarding process

To overcome these limitations, best practices are often written to be persisted, whatever happens for the team members. Let’s see 3 ways to achieve that.

📘 A Knowledge Management or Wiki tool

The use of tools such as Confluence or Notion is common as they are designed for knowledge management, not only for tech teams. Product or Marketing teams use such tools as well. Best practices can be organized in different ways depending on the organization structure: either by languages, frameworks, projects (contexts), etc.

Pros :

• Offer features for collaborative edition and sharing for teams

Cons :

• Require effort and involvement to maintain and to keep up-to-date
• Generic tools lack integrations for developers on a daily usage; as a consequence, developers tend to neglect wikis

👩🏽‍💻 Markdown files in your code repository

To avoid content scattered in different locations, another approach is to record best practices in textual files and version them in Git repositories. Markdown is often used for that purpose. Practices can be grouped in a single file or written in different files with specific topics.

Pros :

• Best practices are co-located with the source code

Cons :

• Not actionable for developers while coding
• A process must be settled so that the files are regularly maintained and kept up to date

🚀 A dedicated solution

At Promyze we addressed this challenge with a collaborative solution designed for best practices definition and sharing, within a team, across teams, or in communities of practices.

With Promyze, developers contribute through best practices identification in their code source, which are then discussed with all the team for validation. Those which are validated get persisted and can be accessed through the UI or the IDE/Web Browsers Plugins.

Promyze’s strengths:

• Sharing of best practices within a team or for several teams
• Features designed to continuously enrich best practices’ repository and to keep it consistent
• IDE & Web browsers plugins to fully integrate with developers’ process and daily work