The world's most perfect coding standard turns into shelf-ware without proper and regular enforcement. It is not enough to create a coding standard, get commitment for it and then leave it at that. At first everybody in the team knows about coding standard and tries to follow it but memory is a fickle thing. The author won't always verify that he's following the standard, he has to concentrate on the functionality, sometimes he just runs out of time. Every now and then the author even makes mistakes in trying to follow the coding standard. All this amounts to code that contains violations of the accepted coding standard. If you just assume the code is, of course, compliant with the coding standard, you will, of course, err.

A code inspection enforces the coding standard. All participants are reminded of the standard and even asked to take a detailed look into it and check that the code is according to the guidelines. Even a perfect coding standard loses its luster over time without inspections. A coding standard not enforced regularly will diminish in value over time until it becomes just a worthless, forgotten memory in a binder.

One of the key reasons to perform inspections is to remind the developers of the coding standard. Assumptions are often dangerous and assuming that code follows a coding standard simply because one exists is fatal to quality.

Excerpt is part of Chapter 2. "Symptoms".