A new engineer was hired for our team; he managed to get the project running in our IDE in less than a day which immediately told us he had at least half a clue. Asked to get him started, I figured a simple report page we needed for our customer was a good way to introduce him to the system. It was a simple report showing all the teachers in a school and their classrooms. The next day he checked in and let me know it was done. Impressed, I ran the report. It worked beautifully. It ran under different users, took multiple parameters beyond the original scope, and had good error messages when there was a problem. This guy knew what he was doing. I decided to look under the hood. Code was fantastic, well formatted, and even concise informative comments, but he used very truncated variable names, and I realized I had forgotten to mention our coding standards document. I didn’t really care about this since it was such a basic report (it was just a web page with very basic formatting), but then I noticed it. Very subtle because of the case usage on the abbreviation of the second word, but I realized I couldn't pass this code on to our customer:





//Get all teachers

for (Iterator tIt = al.Iterator(); tIt.hasNext();)

{

tchr = (Teacher) tIt.next()

…

//Get the teacher's classrooms

for (Iterator clIt = tchr.getClassrooms().iterator; clIt.hasNext();)

{

clrm = (Classroom) clIt.next();

...

}

}

This was quite some years ago; he is still with us and follows the standards doc to the letter.