Coding

From: Jayaprakash Bandu
Sent: Monday, October 15, 2007 9:59 AM
To: Kalyan Mukherjee; Savitha R R; Surekha AM; M Kaviraj; manju; Venkataradhasaradhi; radhika; Gurunathan T Natesan
Cc: Vijay V.Maladkar; Aravind
Subject: Coding



Coding is the most important task in the development cycle. This is even more significant in the world of AutoZone SMS applications. Not sure how many of you realize but every line of code that you generate touches the daily lives of 40,000 fellow AutoZoners all over the United States and Mexico. It is in your hand to make their lives better or worse. I have no doubts that we all sincerely strive to make their lives a lot better and easier to work on the SMS applications. You must have the passion to develop applications to such an elite group of AutoZoners working in the field satisfying 6 million valuable customers every week.



The code is what goes into the store. It is not the requirements document, not the design document nor the test cases that drive the system. It is the code you freshly write or clone from existing programs which goes to the store. Enormous emphasis has to be given to every decision you make in the code, every return value, every error log, every statement where you set the data, you copy the data, you delete the data!! At most importance should be given before you change a function. You have to make sure all possible conditions that use the function are not impacted negatively with your changes.



You must deliver the code that is robust. Give the code to 10 different reviewers and you should not receive any review comments. Give the code to 20 best testers and they should not be able to break it. Let us keep them as objectives before you deliver the code!! One must believe strongly that her/his code does not depend on the code reviewers or the testers. Code review and testing are simply secondary processes to make sure the code is perfect and of high quality. You must feel the complete responsibility and total accountability before you send your code for review.



PS: I had guts to write in my first appraisals report that C language is my mother tongue and AutoZone C coding standards are in my blood!! That may sound funny but that is the passion I have to write code for AutoZone, any day and every day!!



Please forward this message to your teams and feel proud to share your thoughts.



Sincerely,

Bandu.