I've never actually seen rules or guidelines that were:
* Non-trivial - e.g. not about spaces or line lengths or something.
* Objective and specific - e.g. with a vague principle like "single responsibility" it doesn't take much to trigger an argument about what constitutes a responsibility.
* Actually made it more maintainable - I remember some of the DDD guidelines were non-trivial, objective and specific but they 3-5xed the SLOC.
I tried writing some of my own, but it's a lot of work, doesn't generalize very easily and is as likely to spark an argument as it is to actually help.
But those are "writing techniques" and not the actual writing / stories. As long as you're having a "conversation" with a codebase by continually reading and editing code you know what parts of the code flow well and are expressive and what parts are not. I think a discussion about the eloquence of a codebase should be had in continuity, parallel to all other individual tasks.
Actually the article illustrates some of the criteria like if the code answers "how/what/why" questions. From my own experience the codebases where the code didn't answer those questions were the worst.
I've never actually seen rules or guidelines that were:
* Non-trivial - e.g. not about spaces or line lengths or something.
* Objective and specific - e.g. with a vague principle like "single responsibility" it doesn't take much to trigger an argument about what constitutes a responsibility.
* Actually made it more maintainable - I remember some of the DDD guidelines were non-trivial, objective and specific but they 3-5xed the SLOC.
I tried writing some of my own, but it's a lot of work, doesn't generalize very easily and is as likely to spark an argument as it is to actually help.