Defining Useful Coding Practices?

markmcb writes "A NASA engineer recently wrote about his disappointment that despite having well-documented coding practices, 'clever' solutions still made the code he has to maintain hard to follow. This got me thinking about the overhead spent at my own company regarding our code. We too have best practices that are documented, but most seem to focus on the basics, e.g., comments, modularity, etc. While those things are good, they don't directly ensure that quality, maintainable code is written. As the author points out, an elegant one-liner coupled with a comment from a few revisions ago makes for a good headache. I'm curious what experience others have had with this, and if you've seen manageable practices that ultimately offer a lot of value to the next programmer down the line who will have to maintain the code."pa href="http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/12/06/1456251/Defining-Useful-Coding-Practices?from=rss"img src="http://developers.slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=09/12/06/1456251"/a/ppa href="http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/12/06/1456251/Defining-Useful-Coding-Practices?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./ppa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/SImwGaa-FHbn8bKaiDHGJTinCcc/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/SImwGaa-FHbn8bKaiDHGJTinCcc/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/SImwGaa-FHbn8bKaiDHGJTinCcc/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/SImwGaa-FHbn8bKaiDHGJTinCcc/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/0OnKsfI9YxA" height="1" width="1"/

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