Best Practices Ever for Software Development

1. Write programs for people, not computers.
   • a program should not require its readers to hold more than a handful of facts in memory at once
   • names should be consistent, distinctive and meaningful
   • code style and formatting should be consistent
   • all aspects of software development should be broken down into tasks roughly an hour long
2. Automate repetitive tasks.
   • rely on the computer to repeat tasks
   • save recent commands in a file for re-use
   • use a build tool to automate scientific workflows
3. Use the computer to record history.
   • software tools should be used to track computational work automatically
4. Make incremental changes.
   • work in small steps with frequent feedback and course correction
5. Use version control.
   • use a version control system
   • everything that has been created manually should be put in version control
6. Don’t repeat yourself (or others).
   • every piece of data must have a single authoritative representation in the system
   • code should be modularized rather than copied and pasted
   • re-use code instead of rewriting it
7. Plan for mistakes.
   • add assertions to programs to check their operation
   • use an off-the-shelf unit testing library
   • use all available oracles when testing programs
   • turn bugs into test cases
   • use a symbolic debugger
8. Optimize software only after it works correctly.
   • use a profiler to identify bottlenecks
   • write code in the highest-level language possible
9. Document design and purpose, not mechanics.
   • document interfaces and reasons, not implementations
   • refactor code instead of explaining how it works
   • embed the documentation for a piece of software in that software
10. Collaborate.
    • use pre-merge code reviews
    • use pair programming when bringing someone new up to speed and when tackling particularly tricky problems

The only extra I would have included would be:

11. Maintain and update older code.
 

Reference: Best Practices Ever for Software Development from our JCG partner Andriy Andrunevchyn at the Java User Group of Lviv blog.

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