To avoid chaos most developers follows some kind of code standard - implicitly or explicitly. I believe that one of several ways to make developers take ownership of code they have not created themselves is to make the code look like they have actually created it themselves. Collectively following a code standard is a vital way of achieving this.

If you take a look at our code standard you will probably notice that it is a pretty rigid one - it does however not cover everything as volume is not necessarily a quality in it self. If you think something important is missing I would appreciate suggestions for further rules and guidelines.

In many cases reuse - of components or even better of a framework - can however make rules and guidelines unnecessary by implementing the guidelines as methods, classes, patterns, components and frameworks. So while code standards are important, reuse is almost even more important. No matter how big a framework you create you will however still have to create code standards and guidelines - in the very least on how to create and use the framework.

You can get Captator's code standard here.