As I wrote in my previous journal entry, I am working on a list of good/best practices.
This is what I have so far, I have plenty of other things, but these might be too Perl specific, so I will save these for later.
So here is my current draft for a list of good practices.
- Keep your subroutines small, for easier test and readability
- Encapsulate complexity for faster understanding and readability. Blackboxes can be skipped at first glance to be revisited later.
- Make your components distributable so they can easily be deployed else and everywhere
- Keep your distributions as small as possible, so you only distribute logically related functionality and not unrelated components, resulting in unwanted side-effects upon deployment and avoid installing unnecessary stuff since later examination of installations can be misleading
- Version everything, distributions, components, documentation etc.
- Make your components environment agnostic, so they can move from development/test/staging/product/whereever without code changes
- Make your components configurable so configuration changes can be made without code changes
- Make your applications environment agnostic so they can be executed everywhere and not necessarily only on designated environments, if not possible make at least sure that the are testable
- Test everything that could possibly break. Do not make assumptions about environment, encoding or execution.
I know you have something to add or at least a comment, so please let me know.
Corrolary
petdance on 2008-02-01T00:14:50
Test everything that ever has broken. If it breaks, write a test for it before fixing it.
Re:Corrolary
jonasbn on 2008-02-01T08:00:37
Doh! how could I forget that, it is one of my favorite practices as you might can read I even forget to use this strategy.
But when I have used it has proven magnificent.
