If You Have Programming Standards, Please Raise Your Hand: An Everyman's Guide
Dianne Louise Rhodes · 2010
When a new project starts, or a new manager takes over an old project, the programming team is faced with a new culture. Often, this means that they are asked to adhere to yet another set of programming standards, use style sheets, and are subject to peer reviews. This process is usually short lived, because of the lack of a practical approach to applying standards and enforcement and failure to budget time and resources in the project schedule. This paper goes through a step by step process of developing programming standards, classifying them and entering them into a database. This database can then be used to develop style sheets and check lists for peer review and testing. Through peer reviews and in preparation for them, programmers learn good programming practices. We describe in detail the most common standards; why and how they should be applied.