The 15 Step Rails Code Quality Checklist

The Ruby on Rails Code Quality Checklist is a 15 point "quality checklist" for Rails developers to run against their Rails applications by Matthew Paul Moore. It's a year old, so predates Rails 2.2 and 2.3, but it recently made the rounds at the main social bookmarking sites, and I felt it was worth bringing up.

The first 5 of Matthew's points - in a very basic summary - are:

1. Each controller action only calls one model method other than an initial find or new
2. Only one or two instance variables are shared between each controller and view
3. All model and variable names are both immediately obvious (to a new developer) and as short as possible without using abbreviations.
4. All custom "finds" accessed from more than one place in the code use named_scope instead of a custom method.
5. A .find or .find_by_ is never called in a view or view helper.

To learn the rest, you'll need to check out his article. He doesn't just list the points. He goes into further detail about every one. A great read.

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