There are 12 practices in XP and 5 values. The values are open to interpretation but the practices are pretty clear. Many people magpie practices and while the practices are often useful in isolation there is a synergy between them which can be lost.
Coding Standards is one of the practices. To me it encompasses more than the simple things captured by findbugs, checkstyle, and source code analysis tools. It goes beyond naming standards, line lengths, function and class size, and even sophisticated measures like fan out, cylcometric complexity, and whatever other panaceas.
Coding Standards should bring us toward principles like: any developer should be able to understand the code others have written; our implementations should correspond to the way we talk about our system; a developer should be able to figure out requirements from the written code; it should be easy to represent or articulate what we have implemented so that we can meaningfully reason about it and reliably build on it.
It's frequently not so. Frequently TDD and Pair Programming produce code that only makes sense to the developers writing it while they are actively working on it, sometimes developers don't understand what they're doing even as they satisfy tests. Tests frequently capture behaviour that is incidental to requirements. Developers hunker down and satisfy requirements expressed in tests but don't look up beyond that narrow focus.
Failing to attend to Coding Standards is failing to do XP, or at least failing at the whole cloth, and undoubted exposing development to greater risk of producing poor quality results.
There's nothing wrong with building up a personal or local process by picking elements from different development systems, but sometimes it feels like those personal processes are about making life easier by rejecting or neglecting things that require active practice to get substantial quality.
Coding Standards, don't leave home without them.
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