Chapter 9: Developing Standards for Your Solution

Overview

In this chapter, we will look at establishing standards, processes, and quality and performance metrics. Standards are an effective way for your project staff to have a common set of criteria to follow when designing and developing your solution. This extends to user, code, and project documents, allowing for a consistent look and feel for those documents. By establishing standards for what types of documents to generate, the team can focus on gathering the appropriate information.

These standards can extend into coding practices, such as source code formatting and naming conventions. There are also user interface standards for Windows and web applications. Although these application types each have different needs, we will analyze some of their common characteristics. Finally, there are testing standards, which determine how much or how little testing you need to perform. Testing standards also define how testing should be configured and implemented.

An important part of the development lifecycle is code and document review. Code reviews help to enforce standards in the development process. This examination helps ensure that the team agrees on how to solve the problem and develop the solution. Microsoft Visual SourceSafe is a common tool for maintaining code and configuration information. Visual SourceSafe has advanced features for handling single and multiple checkouts and can handle deployments and maintenance of code releases.

The testing and deployment phase helps to focus on the transition from building features to focusing on quality. Quality and performance metrics make predictions about the release date, bug quantity or severity, the bug resolution progress, and the quality of the solution. Accurate predictions result from applying effective techniques such as assuming a fixed ship date mindset and using bug convergence and zero bug bounce as stabilizing indicators.