Christopher
Stoll

Software Development Guidelines 02a

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.

Planning

No code should be written until a plan is defined.

Large projects should go through the project management office where a formal plan will be written and a defined approval process will be followed. Small projects should still have at least a minimal amount of documentation of the intent and scope of the program.

An analyst or project manager from the IT department should be contacted for assistance in determining whether a project is small or large and for initiating project requests. Below are some characteristics of large development projects, if any of these conditions are met then the Project Management Office should be contacted.

  • More than 40 hours of effort will be required
  • The user base spans across departments, locations, product lines, or regions
  • A database is required
  • A NetInstall package is required

The IT department should be involved during the planning stages of all software to ensure that the software is properly aligned with other Company IT initiatives.

Published: 2008-05-12
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