Hey guys,

I'm starting up a company and hiring programmers to churn out the codes for me. But over here in Malaysia, codes are badly written, there isn't any standardization or methodology to follow with.

1. How do I instill these practices to programmers?
2. What are the tools that can help the programmers in writing good codes? Facilitate collaboration or internal wiki?

I look forward to your response!

every coder has a different style. you can't force them to do what you like. it's true that codes should follow the principles of proper coding. but very often, this is not properly followed simply because in the real world, many coders take over projects midway and it's just too time consuming to change a huge messy code into something nice when companies have such tight deadlines

Hence would you say that before we have even started, we should have a guideline of the code before it's too late for cleaning up the messy code?

Facilitate collaboration or internal wiki?


let them all use the same naming convention and good commenting I think that will do the job

Plus start with a framework, so all of them can expand on the same architecture.

Do you have a plan?

Do you have an visual architect of what you want to do and functions of the website with completions status?

Peace,

I'd recommend coming up with a set of guidelines for the type of code you want. Things like proper variable/object naming, good commenting (describing what a block of code does, not simply saying "object created", "variable assigned", etc), building reusable code, etc.

Then have a code review process, where before anything goes to production it must pass inspection by you or an assigned code reviewer. If it is crap it gets sent back to the programmer to fix. If they continually turn in bad code, fire them.

question: is it your fulltime job to manage the programming team?

your task ahead is tough, though not impossible. It requires a lot of experience (especially on your chosen platform). You might be better off hiring somebody else who knows this job.

Your chosen platform should have a _best practices_ guidelines. I work in a team where perl is the chosen development platform. Code quality really increased over time as we adopt a set of "best practices" (actually based on book called "Perl Best Practices").

As mentioned, a mentor or a capable senior team manager should help a lot.
Formal training also is one way to boost expertise among your programmers.

For me, really productive teams involve many of the following elements:
= high user/customer input and involvement
= best practices guidelines (depends on the platform).
= testing (preferrably automated): unit testing, acceptance testing at least
= good architecture and design of the system (depends on the senior guys)
= use of tools like version control system (e.g. subversion)
= good project management and project structure

Start small, introduce new ideas. A very important thing for the team is that, EVERYBODY should understand the VALUE of what you are introducing. And everybody should be COMMITTED to the goal of improving the code.

Some people recommend the Zend Framwork Coding Standard if you are using PHP.

http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/coding-standard.html

You could always extract the necessary parts and create your own coding standards.