Ten Essen­tial Devel­op­ment Prac­tices is an arti­cle from Perl.com (O’Reilly) based on Perl Best Prac­tices, a book on Perl cod­ing and devel­op­ment guide­lines. Given how obvi­ous the items on this list are, it’s sur­pris­ing how this isn’t followed.

  1. Design the Module’s Inter­face First
  2. Write the Test Cases Before the Code
  3. Cre­ate Stan­dard POD Tem­plates for Mod­ules and Applications
  4. Use a Revi­sion Con­trol System
  5. Cre­ate Con­sis­tent Command-Line Interfaces
  6. Agree Upon a Coher­ent Lay­out Style and Auto­mate It with perltidy
  7. Code in Com­mented Paragraphs
  8. Throw Excep­tions Instead of Return­ing Spe­cial Val­ues or Set­ting Flags
  9. Add New Test Cases Before you Start Debugging
  10. Don’t Opti­mize Code–Benchmark It