I once went in to clean up a project that was designed by a committee of people spread all over the world. The unit was large moving equipment that if something

I once went in to clean up a project that was designed by a committee of people spread all over the world. The unit was large moving equipment that if something went wrong, people might die. The unit was composed of several different CPU modules communicating on a property bus. Each module's software was written by a different group in a different part of the world. The operator's requested speed was input in Feet Per Minute. The output to a Variable Frequency Drive was in tenths of Hertz. The tachometer feedback was in RPM, and to top it off all the internal calculations were done in Radians-Per-Second. The first thing I did to get the project back on track was to adopt a standardized variable naming convention that included the units. For example the Operator Request became operator_request_fpm_u16. You then knew immediately you were dealing with Feet Per Minutes, and that it was a 16 bit unsigned variable. After the variable name cleanup many of the bugs became self documented, when you saw something like "operator_request_fpm_u16 / vfd_hz_s32" in the code, you knew there was a problem that needed to be fixed...