Teams lose hours in review arguing over names, error handling and comment style. This document settles those questions once. Every rule is tagged must, should or may, shows a compliant and a non-compliant example, gives its reason in a sentence and says whether lint or CI enforces it.

The sample is written for Birchfield Digital, a fictional software studio, with 28 rules grouped under six headings, a code ownership page, a ranked error-handling register and a testing checklist with owners and dates. Delete the rules your stack does not need, replace the code with a real before-and-after from your repository and name an owner.