Over half of these best practices involve keeping some code-level metric low, and they illustrate my position that, while coding standards and style guidelines can be useful, you cannot expect them to transform the way your organization writes code.

This is because they do not concern themselves with the issues that lead programmers into writing unnecessarily complex code, and consequently offer no guidance into how to address the root causes of the problem. If you take a programmer with a tendency to write 'large' code and insist that he follows these guidelines, you are likely to end up with a large number of smaller classes with unusual semantics and interdependencies.