Coding Standards and Best Practices

Hi Everyone,

I know this is a large topic area when talking about coding standards and best practices. I would gratefully appreciate some constructive feedback on this area. To give you a heads-up, I'm designing and developing a team-based tool that aims to help with coding standards and best practices. It's currently called RuleX.

If you have a moment, it would be gratefully appreciated if I can get your opinion on these few questions?


1. If you could have a coding standards analysis tool, what areas of your code would you like to check specifically?


2. Is there a particular language that you wish you could analyse? For example, HTML, Javascript or C++.


3. What appeals to you the most in a coding standards / best practices tool - speed, presentation, features?


4. What do you find missing from your day to day coding?


Thank you for your help.

Simon.

Adherence to a discrete, defined set of coding standards. The ability to detect that a class has implemented a common Design Pattern, and that it's structure follows a standard implementation that pattern; or, notification that a class implements an Anti-Pattern, with recommendations on alternate approaches.

I'd love to see a free/open-source PHP coding standards tool, which functions as a plug-in to Eclipse.

Ease of use, both in defining my organization's coding standards, as well as parsing through developed code to check for adherence to those standards.

The ability to auto-generate Unit Tests for all public interfaces. Hand-writing test cases... well, it gets kinda repetitive.