All source code that is submitted for a product release shall conform to all of the rules herein, except if its specific deviations have been documented and approved.
At the project level, rules that indicate a specific quantity of something (e.g., the number of characters per indent or maximum lines in a function) can be changed to enforce a different quantity that works better in the actual development tools. The specific quantity is not typically the key property of these types of rules.
At the level of source code modules, it is only acceptable to deviate from this coding standard with the approval of the project manager. The approver’s name and the reasoning supporting the deviation shall be documented as closely as possible to the actual deviation(s). For example, a single deviation in a single function should be documented in a comment above or within the implementation code—whichever will be clearest to the next reader. By contrast, a module-wide deviation may be better documented in the comments at the top of the source file.