Here's a short story about what can happen even to the best of coding standards. Two years ago a software team had an excellent coding standard. With it they could uncover massive amounts of relevant findings. They made use of the many opportunities for improvement and their code became better and they learned more about the craft of programming themselves.

Before long all team members were aware of the rules of the coding standard and followed them unconsciously. The number of findings in code inspections started to diminish. Now after two years there are hardly and findings. It isn't really worth performing code inspections for the team. But the rules and the code inspection used to be so useful that they cannot be dropped. Now, the code inspection process is almost dead.

After the immediate pain subsides, after the current important problems are dealt with and the team members learn to abide by the coding standard, new pains will emerge. New problems will crop up in the code. The priority of errors will shift. The coding standard must follow the situation. The learned and followed rules should be dropped from the coding standard. New problems mean adding new rules and guidelines to the coding standard.

A properly alive inspection process has an evolving and refreshed coding standard, while an old and moribund inspection process uses an ancient coding standard carved into stone. Check the date of the last update on your coding standard and make your conclusions. Is the coding standard up to date or has it gone bad like sour milk? Have your inspections become stagnant?

The active rule set should evolve with the team using it. The team members will learn to follow the rules subconsciously as they write new code. There is less and less need for reenforcing old rules. On the other hand, there are numerous other rules broken more or less frequently. The active rule set should be updated to contain the rule most likely to be broken without checking.

This excerpt all but closes Chapter 2. "Symptoms".