Building Software Teams

Chapter 9. Standardize the Development Environment

To accomplish anything whatsoever one must have standards. None have yet accomplished anything without them.

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Best Practice:

• Define and agree on standards in the development process.

• Ensure that developers adhere to standards and that standards reflect the goals of the team.

• This improves the development process because standards help enforce best practices and standards simplify both the development process and code.

This chapter deals with standardization in the development process. Standards make the results of development work more predictable. This predictability leads to a “hygienic development environment,” in which developers work in a consistent manner. By this standardization, we mean four things:

Standardized tooling and technologies

Agreeing on default tools and technologies, and not using a complex technology stack for solving a simple problem.

Process standards

Agreeing on steps that developers need to perform during development.

Standardized coding style

Defining a coding style (e.g., conventions for naming or indentation) and enforcing it.

Code quality control

Defining and continuously measuring code quality in terms of complexity, readability, and testability of code.

Arriving at standards that are the best fit for your development team or organization is not trivial: if you put three developers in a room, they will usually offer three different ways to solve a certain problem, all three ...