What is Coding Standards

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce scientific software developers to software engineering tools and techniques that will save them much blood, sweat, and tears and allow them to demonstrate the quality of their software. By introducing ideas around the software development life cycle, source code analysis, documentation, and testing, and touching on best practices, this chapter demonstrates ways in which scientific software can be improved and future developments made easier. This is not a research article on current software engineering methods, nor does it attempt to specify best practices. Its aim is to introduce components that can be built into a tailored process. The chapter draws upon ideas of best practice current in software engineering, but recommends using these only selectively. This is done by presenting details of tools that can be used to implement these ideas and a set of case studies to demonstrate their use.