Goals

To consolidate in one place, the leading best practices for software development.

To make each individual best-practice easily sharable.

Contributions

Pull requests welcome from all. There are plenty of entries below waiting to be written up. More details can be found here.

Coding Best Practices

• Prefer Composition over Inheritance
• Always use descriptive names
• Avoid Nulls
• Avoid nested code
• Prefer immutability
• Prefer code reuse
• Avoid negatives and double-negatives
• Prefer readable code
• Never use magic values
• Prefer short methods
• Always delete dead code

Design Best Practices

• Prefer alerting over silently hiding bugs
• Avoid premature optimizations
• Prefer validating assumptions
• Avoid big-bang switchovers
• Prefer restricting visibility

Testing Best Practices

• Prefer testing state over testing behavior