Clean ABAP Guideline

Specifications, naming conventions best practices for modern ABAP coding

The guidelines for Clean ABAP are collected in the following GitHub: https://github.com/SAP/styleguides/blob/main/clean-abap/CleanABAP_de.md.

For example, specifications are made for variable and parameter names, naming conventions for DDIC objects are suggested and best practices for comments, exception handling and method calls are described. The guideline is based on the principles of “clean code”, which can be applied across all programming languages.

Many aspects will take some getting used to and be controversial for long-time ABAP developers, as many concepts are adopted from other programming languages that have not been common in ABAP for a long time. These should therefore be discussed and agreed in the project team. Especially if a lot of customer-specific coding already exists, adopting new naming conventions can be very time-consuming. However, the following tools help with a comprehensive code review and implementation. The guideline also presents a four-step plan on how old coding can be adapted to Clean ABAP: https://github.com/SAP/styleguides/blob/main/clean-abap/CleanABAP_de.md#how-to-refactoring-von-legacy-code

The guideline is available in several languages and can therefore also be used in international projects.