Baseline Coding Standards

Baseline coding standards for OPG that teams can customise and adapt to their needs, starting from a common point

Standards

Code should conform to recognised style guides or standards, and take advantage of automatic style checkers, linters, and static analysis tools
Project structures should follow the conventions of the language and frameworks used
Favour clear variable and function names over acronyms, abbreviations and explanations in comments (and don’t assume technical and business domain knowledge)
Favour open standards over proprietary or customised ones
Any information or user interactable parts of the system must be Accessible

Code should be:

Readable
Correct, clear, and concise - in that order
Tested, automatically and with easily visible measures of what is covered
Secure, and make use of automated tools like dependency scanners
Maintained; addressing emerging user feedback, with libraries and kept up to date, and agreed pattern changes applied consistently across the application
Observable, with adequate logging, tracing, metrics and alerts. To understand the state of the system, be aware of issues, and see the impact of changes
Commented where it aids understanding and good naming cannot solve this
Appropriately performant and scalable
Documented (with clarity on what documentation goes where and adequate signposting - see the repo guide for more details)
Open by default (With the MoJ Copyright version of the MIT Licence)

This page was last reviewed on 14 October 2024. It needs to be reviewed again on 14 October 2025 by the page owner #opg-developers .

This page was set to be reviewed before 14 October 2025 by the page owner #opg-developers. This might mean the content is out of date.