Building Consensus: Agreeing on Rules for our Massive C++ codebase

We will describe our process and the challenges of trying to balance the needs of hundreds of teams, sharing our early mistakes and ultimate success. Attendees should be able to apply what we learned to their own organizations when introducing their own set of C++ rules.

The talk also highlights the value of journalism skills in approaching engineering questions. Most important are the willingness to seek out all sides of a question; being humble enough to truly listen to even your loudest critics; and the endurance to keep asking questions until the issues become completely clear.

Our outreach effort has led us to talk to hundreds of people across many different application and infrastructure teams with different needs and coding styles. As automatic validation was turned on, we found ourselves both responsible for training and for adjusting the rules to realities we hadn’t considered.Our outreach is ongoing.