Best Programming Practices

NEW DELHI: Think of a software programmer, the picture one draws up immediately is of a person sitting in front of a PC, deeply engrossed, with a cup of steaming coffee, clearly sending the message, "Great mind at work! Do not disturb." Well, this may have been the case years back when programmers were a rare breed and there was no concept of communities. Things have changed since then and these days we hear of terms like
agile
development, collaborative
computing, pair-programming, distributed programming etc.

Open source movement was the first to introduce the community concept and collaborative development or shared programming. The people behind the open source concept strongly believe in innovating by code sharing and collaboration. The open nature of these projects allows faster bug tracking, faster debugging and feature-rich end products.

While on the subject of collaborative computing, one cannot miss out the mention of
Ward Cunningham, the brain behind
wiki-- a program that allows people to create and maintain Web pages collaboratively. An ex-Microsoft employee, currently Cunningham works as a director of community development at the Eclipse Foundation.
A a strong promoter of collaborative development, Cunningham bets big on open source and says that it will become a major trend in the years to come.

In his current role Cunnigham spends a lot of time addressing developer groups, sharing with them insights on good programming practices that he has gathered over so many years. Here's what he says:

Abandon the 'lone-wolf approach' and adopt collaborative programming

A great promoter of open source Cunnigham stresses on the imperative need for abandoning the standalone way of programming and adopting the collaborative approach. Citing the success of
WikiWiki web as an example, he says one can innovate only by sharing of ideas and developers should come out of their cocoons and start sharing code with fellow developers.

Program in pairs

Advocating the extreme programming (XP) approach, Cunnigham emphasized the importance of getting into groups or working in pairs while writing code. Keeping software design simple, thorough testing, collective ownership and continuos integration are some other areas that should always be kept in mind to achieve hundred percent success at work.

Pace yourself and trade roles

According to Cunnigham, developers should always set a pace for themselves while writing software and keep monitoring it, this would help them 'avoid fatigue and self-doubt' and ensure that they are on the right track with their fellow developers. Programmers should try and 'trade roles' to spur fresh ideas.

Manage complexity like debt

Drawing an analogy between complexity and debt, Cunnigham says, like one avoids borrowing money a programmer should avoid skipping designs; maintenance issues should be dealt like incurring interest payments; refactoring or improving the design of existing code should be handled like repaying debt; and engineering policies should be worked upon like one devises financial policies. Developers can keep a lot of problems at bay if they incorporate these tips in their day-to-day working.

What do you think about the best practices shared in this article? Are you following some of these at your workplace? Do you have better ideas?
Share them with us.