If you have a team of different skills and tastes, you are going to have a tough time convincing everyone to follow the same standards. The best approach is to have a team meeting and developing your own standards document. You may use this document as a template to prepare your own document.
Distribute a copy of this document (or your own coding standard document) well ahead of the coding standards meeting. All members should come to the meeting prepared to discuss pros and cons of the various points in the document. Make sure you have a manager present in the meeting to resolve conflicts.
Discuss all points in the document. Everyone may have a different opinion about each point, but at the end of the discussion, all members must agree upon the standard you are going to follow. Prepare a new standards document with appropriate changes based on the suggestions from all of the team members. Print copies of it and post it in all workstations.
After you start the development, you must schedule code review meetings to ensure that everyone is following the rules. 3 types of code reviews are recommended:
- Peer review – another team member review the code to ensure that the code follows the coding standards and meets requirements. This level of review can include some unit testing also. Every file in the project must go through this process.
- Architect review – the architect of the team must review the core modules of the project to ensure that they adhere to the design and there is no “big” mistakes that can affect the project in the long run.
- Group review – randomly select one or more files and conduct a group review once in a week. Distribute a printed copy of the files to all team members 30 minutes before the meeting. Let them read and come up with points for discussion. In the group review meeting, use a projector to display the file content in the screen. Go through every sections of the code and let every member give their suggestions on how could that piece of code can be written in a better way. (Don’t forget to appreciate the developer for the good work and also make sure he does not get offended by the “group attack”!)