Christopher
Stoll

Software Development Guidelines 01

At my company I have seen a lot of bad software development practices over the years, so I have created a set of software development guidelines to help establish a set of best practices and baseline software requirements. I am publishing a series of experts from those guidelines here so that I might get some useful feedback that will help improve them.

Introduction

Intent

The intent of this document is to establish guidelines for software development which should help reduce total cost of ownership in the long term, ensure quality and consistency across the North American region, and implement a set of checks and balances between the various IT groups that improve operational transparency and reduce organizational risks.

Due to the nature of our operations we have software developers and maintainers spread across a large geographical region, which can lead to disparity in the quality of software produced and methodologies used. This document will provide a minimum set of expectations for developers to follow and bring some commonalities to our methodologies.

Applicability

This document applies to all software, regardless of the programming language, application, or origin, created or modified for the Company in North America.

Limitations

A software’s adherence to these standards does not constitute endorsement by the Company or it’s IT department.

This guideline specifies development requirements, but it does not guarantee a developer’s access to required IT resources. Access to required IT resources must be acquired through established channels.

This is not a programming style guideline, it does not dictate programming languages or styles, those should be covered separately in other documents.

Definitions

Software

In this document the term software will refer to both compiled software and interpreted software.

Published: 2008-05-11
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