Standards And Practices 5 - 2020 — Code

Hardcoding credentials (API keys, database passwords) in source code became a fireable offense in many organizations following the 2020 standard. The practice moved entirely toward environment variables and secret management tools (HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager).

A surprising evolution in the 2020 standards was the re-evaluation of comments. The mantra became: "Good code is its own best documentation." code standards and practices 5 - 2020

Measure reduction in bug rates and code review cycle time. Practice 5 teams in 2020 reported (per DORA metrics). Hardcoding credentials (API keys