Programming: Writing methods -- Best Practices

Writing methods -- best practices:

• Use meaningful names for methods and their arguments
• Try to keep the number of arguments as low as possible (to be less than 6)
• Methods should be short (adhere to single responsibility principle)
• Document public methods
• Perform argument validation
• Try to avoid returning null 
• Use visibility and accessibility rules 
• Java: Use annotation to mark "special" methods (@SafeVarargs or @Override)