During my career I have been working in quite a few companies employing between 3 and 200 developers in industries such as retail, e-commerce, design, consultancy, multimedia and leisure.
All these companies have one thing in common when it comes to software development; they were making a mess of it, current company excluded naturally. Things went wrong on every level, from upper management, project management, resource management, development and support. It made me sad, but I now realise that it is simply the reality of our business.
I could rant on forever about no-one knowing what they are doing, but I decided to pick out one layer and try to improve it by developing a set of well defined coding standards and development guidelines.
One of the problems companies have to deal with nowadays is the shear number of different technologies involved across projects or even in a single project. It is not at all unusual that a single project, e.g. an Intranet, uses C#, Java, T-SQL, PL/SQL, JavaScript, ASP.NET and HTML. It is no surprise that most companies don’t even dare to start on such a set of guidelines, let alone finish it.
Anyway, I have written such a document and it is available for download. It includes guidelines for VB, VBScript, C#, JavaScript, ASP, ASP.NET, T-SQL, PL/SQL, HTML AND Java. It is not perfect and it will never be, but it is an excellent starting point if all you have is nothing.
So what have I achieved? All these companies I worked for are still a mess, but at least their software development team is a little bit more consistent. This is all I could have hoped for.