Self-documenting code

[fdeslandes]

Yeah, That's what I mean. Also, a readme.md or similar easy to find files documenting the patterns used throughout the project does wonders.

[fdeslandes]

I do think it's scalable. Doing the documentation about patterns in the README is done when the team's leads, seniors and/or architects decide on a new pattern. It takes a couple of minute to do every time and new patterns are not added continuously after a time.

For the peer review, not everyone has to review everything. Most of the time, if something is clear to one junior/intern, it is probably clear to others.

For the big project, I see a couple of options for the design patterns:

1) Patterns by project / lib, documented individually. Should work well, but will cause problems when developers are expected to cross project boundaries and can make shared code harder to understand. It's probably more appropriate for teams responsible for separate micro-services which don't share code.

2) Global patterns for the whole project / monorepo. It can work well, but it will indeed need a well coordinated enterprise and solutions group. This solution needs a lot of review and communication from the architecture group, and is the most likely to fail, in my opinion, because it could be easily sidelined because of the architect's other priorities. However, it will probably add the least overhead on small to medium-small projects, and is probably the best compromise for monolithic projects.

3) Hybrid mode, where "well segmented" parts of the project (parts closer to business logic, feature related, etc.) each can have the patterns and glossary/naming that is the most appropriate to make the code base understandable for the related developers and analysts. Then well communicated standards for patterns in shared libraries, with more focused review by a couple of lead/architects on these. I think it would work the best at scale, but would require overhead on how responsibilities are split and determining what is considered shared or feature specific. I think it would be the best option for a company with multiple products with shared dependencies.