Question: I've worked on a couple of projects where we spent a great deal of time discussing and writing elaborate coding standards covering everything from syntax layout to actual best practices. However, I have also found that these are rarely followed to the full extent. Many developers seem to hesitate to reject a code review based on coding standard violations alone. I.e. violations are committed to the repository on a regular basis. 

My questions are: Do you have coding standards? What do they cover? Are they followed by everyone? And what do you do (if anything) to make sure everybody is following the standards?

I'm aware that there is a similar question [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/167575/should-a-project-manager-enforce-coding-standards), but my concern is not so much how you could do it, but how you are actually going about it and what are the perceived benefits?

Answer: 
We take use of the Eclipse's save actions and formatters. We do have a suggested standard, but nobody is actually enforcing it, so there are some variations on what is actually formatted, and how.

This is something of a nuisance (for me), as various whitespace variations are committed as updates to the SVN repository...
I have never seen a project fail because of lack of coding standards (or adherence to them), or even have any effect on productivity. If you are spending any time on enforcing them then you are wasting money. There are so many important things to worry about instead (like code quality).

Create a set of suggested standards for those who prefer to have something to follow, but leave it at that.