Programmer Humor

Well that makes more sense, but it is still a lot of churn.

Sure, I mean it risks a lot of churn, but it hasn't happened, in practice.

My team will debate the merits of a change until the cows come home, but they know that if they actually decide to make the change, I'll expect them to put in all the necessary work to do it right. Ironically, that tends to curb their appetite for perfectionism.

Thankfully we're all pretty much of like-mind. Nothing changes from project to project in the naming realm.

Yeah. Same here. That's really why I get away with technically allowing a change during any retro. My teams appetite for refinements settled down after our first four sprints as a team.

Things might get interesting again, when we make our next hire; but I consider that part of the onboarding process. It should be worth the trouble just in case the new hire brings brings smart new practices we might have been ignoring. And whether anything changes or not, it creates a time and place for the new hire to argue their differences with the team.

We discuss naming conventions whenever we start a new project, and then it's locked in.

That's very practical, and really accomplishes the same net effect as my team's policy, with less theoretical risk of thrashing.

A possible difference is that sometimes my team will insist on a refactor of some old code to update to the latest standards, at the start of a new project updating an old product.

As long as the code test coverage is acceptable to me, I'll green light that effort as part of sprint zero.

We have tens of thousands of files in the project I'm in charge of, so we'd never consider such an extensive refactor.

Oh yeah. I would probably use my manager veto in that case. At some point it's just too much work to verify the change.

We do have one big repo that we're breaking up over time, and I insist that such changes be limited to the current actively developed component. It's a unique case, because the vision for the repo is to get smaller as parts of it are decoupled (and released as open source). So we don't deeply care if different modules have mildly different code standards, since they're destined for separate public repos, in the long run.

I did do away with BEM when I started, because I despise that clusterfuck of a convention for more reasons than I care to explain here, but I waited until a new project to do it, and everyone agreed with me.

That's some holy and righteous work you accomplished. All future developers on that effort owe you a debt!