Code Standards and Best Practices for Growing Teams

When an engineering team is small, informal agreements tend to work just fine. There’s a shared understanding of how things should be built, because any disagreement can be quickly resolved in a Slack thread or a conversation. But as the team grows from five to fifty developers, these unwritten rules start to cause problems. Suddenly, you find yourself in pull request comments debating brace placement, naming conventions, and which async pattern to use, for the third time in the same week. That’s when the need for explicit code standards becomes painfully obvious.

The friction isn’t limited to PRs. It also shows up in the cost of context switching, when each microservice has its own rules for errors and configuration, for example. A developer from the checkout team trying to fix a bug in the inventory service first has to spend an hour just understanding the local conventions, before even starting to debug. This fragmentation slows down collaboration and makes the entire system harder to understand. If teams can’t even agree on something basic, like a branching strategy or commit message format, you lose the ability to automate release notes or reliably track changes across services.

Code standards as a foundation for shared context

The most common reaction to this chaos is to impose a top-down set of rules. An architecture group might write a very comprehensive document dictating everything from file structure to design patterns. This approach almost always creates more problems. It feels bureaucratic, and developers, who are paid to solve problems, will naturally work around any rule that gets in the way without delivering clear value. The goal isn’t to impose dogma, but to build a shared understanding that reduces cognitive load.

Code standards exist to get trivial decisions out of the way, allowing the team to focus its energy on the real business problem. When they work well, they provide default answers to common questions and clear the path for what actually matters. This is the balance between moving fast now and building a system that remains sustainable for years. The decision to skip writing tests might speed up the release of a feature by a day, but the long-term cost of that missing context and safety net will be paid with interest during the next production incident or refactor.

The real purpose is to reduce cognitive load

Think about the decisions an engineer makes every day. Many of them are repetitive: how should I format this file? What should I name this component? How should I structure API error responses? Good standards provide a single answer, automated or well documented, to these questions. For example, an agreed-upon JSON structure for logs, like {"level": "error", "timestamp": "...", "service": "auth-api", "message": "..."}, means everyone can query and filter logs across the platform using the same tools and techniques, without having to learn the logging quirks of each service.

How to keep code standards adaptable over time

Good code standards are the ones that can evolve over time. They need to be grounded in principles, not rigid rules, and make sense to the people writing code every day. The focus is on making collaboration easier and maintaining quality, without getting in the way of flow.

 

Defining core principles, not rigid rules

Instead of a hundred-page document, start with a small set of principles that are easy to remember and apply. Some good examples:

• Focus on clarity and intent. Code should be written to be understood by everyone first. A variable name like customerData is too vague, but activePayingCustomers clearly communicates intent. This isn’t something a linter can always catch, which makes it a great topic for discussion during code review.
• Promote consistency where it matters most. Be opinionated about what truly affects collaboration across teams, such as API design, security standards, and the use of core libraries. The style of a private function inside a single module matters much less.
• Automate some processes to sustain standards over time like code review . People’s time is too valuable to be spent debating formatting or standards everyone should already be following. Automating this makes life easier for everyone, especially when new people are joining the team.

The “balance zone”

There’s always a point of balance. Every new standard adds a bit of friction, so it’s worth asking whether it really improves day-to-day clarity and consistency.

• Too little: Leads to a chaotic codebase, where every file feels like it was written by a different team. This is where technical debt piles up through duplicated logic and inconsistent patterns.
• Too much: Creates an overly rigid environment that stifles the team and innovation. If engineers have to fight the tools or fill out a form just to try a new library, they’ll stop experimenting. Standards become a source of frustration for the people building.
• Just right:Defines a default path for most cases, while still leaving room for exceptions when they make sense. Consistency where it matters helps collaboration, and flexibility everywhere else gives the team space to innovate.

Some strategies you can try

Putting standards into practice requires more than just writing them down. You need to integrate them into the daily workflow and create a mechanism for them to evolve.

• Define a default path for common tasks. Build tools that make doing the right thing the easiest path. A CLI command like platform-cli create-service, which scaffolds a new project with the correct CI/CD pipelines, logging libraries, and lint configs already set up, is far more effective than a wiki page.
• Make standards a team responsibility. Create a space to discuss and update standards, such as an engineering guild or a dedicated Slack channel. Changes to standards should be proposed and discussed via pull requests in a shared repository, just like any other code change. This increases team buy-in and helps keep standards up to date.
• Implement a feedback loop for refinement. Standards aren’t immutable. The team should regularly ask itself, “Is this rule still helping us, or is it getting in the way?”. If a specific lint rule is constantly being ignored, it might be a sign that the problem is with the rule, not the code.

Integrating best practices into the workflow

In the end, the best standards become part of the team’s daily routine. They’re simply part of how things are done, without adding another checklist.

Code reviews become learning opportunities, where a senior engineer can point to documentation that explains the rationale behind a particular standard. Documenting the why behind a decision in an ADR gives future engineers the context they need to make better decisions. This creates a virtuous cycle in which standards help simplify onboarding for new team members, who in turn learn the conventions and help maintain them, making the entire engineering organization more cohesive and effective as it grows.