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A practice that I've started doing more of in my Rails application has been using a helper to generate javascript to remove duplication and magic numbers or strings. Primarily the only time I've generated javascript is when I needed to generate the url for an Ajax request or something similar using the url_for{:controller=>'foo', :action=>'bar'}. In the past, most of my javascript was placed in a static javascript file in the javascript library. One of the justifications for this of course is to allow the browser to cache the javascript file.

Software development companies started to adopt the principles of Extreme Programming and Agile Development to help reduce risk in a world where change is inevitable. To help adapt to this inevitable change, agile principles call upon feedback and a lot of it. Many people understand the importance of customer feedback (advice during requirements meetings, user acceptance testing, etc…) and unit tests, which gives developers instant feedback several times a day. An equally important source of feedback comes from the testing team who can provide quick, quality feedback.

Collective Code Ownership is an important practice of Extreme Programming and team design is an essential part of it. Whether the design is done individually or collectively can significantly affect the performance of the team and the quality of the code. Team design helps build software that all of the developers understand and can effectively build upon.