Coding Guidelines in Software Engineering

Coding guidelines give some general suggestions regarding the coding style that to be followed for the betterment of understandability and readability of the code.

Some of the coding guidelines are given below :

1. Avoid using a coding style that is too difficult to understand: Code should be easily understandable. The complex code makes maintenance and debugging difficult and expensive.
2. Avoid using an identifier for multiple purposes: Each variable should be given a descriptive and meaningful name indicating the reason behind using it. This is not possible if an identifier is used for multiple purposes and thus it can lead to confusion to the reader. Moreover, it leads to more difficulty during future enhancements.
3. Code should be well documented: The code should be properly commented for understanding easily. Comments regarding the statements increase the understandability of the code.
4. Length of functions should not be very large: Lengthy functions are very difficult to understand. That’s why functions should be small enough to carry out small work and lengthy functions should be broken into small ones for completing small tasks.
5. Try not to use GOTO statement: GOTO statement makes the program unstructured, thus it reduces the understandability of the program and also debugging becomes difficult.

Advantages of Coding Guidelines

1. Coding guidelines increase the efficiency of the software and reduces the development time.
2. Coding guidelines help in detecting errors in the early phases, so it helps to reduce the extra cost incurred by the software project.
3. If coding guidelines are maintained properly, then the software code increases readability and understandability thus it reduces the complexity of the code.
4. It reduces the hidden cost for developing the software.

Different modules specified in the design document are coded in the Coding phase according to the module specification. The main goal of the coding phase is to code from the design document prepared after the design phase through a high-level language and then to unit test this code.