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Professional standards

Introduction
Complex projects, whether you are building a new football stadium, putting together a new network for a multi-national company or writing a new application in a programming language, are rarely worked on by one single individual. Projects usually involve a team or teams of workers. The teams working on one project may be spread across the globe and may number in the thousands. How can you ensure that all of these workers work together in a way that allows a project to progress successfully?

Workers who are off sick or who leave
How can you ensure that if one worker leaves a job or is off sick, another will be able to step into their shoes quickly. Workers need to be able to understand what other workers are doing so that they can do their own particular job successfully, wherever they happen to be in the world.

Working with sub-contractors and other companies
Projects will invariably involve some of the work being done by other companies, outside of the main organisation. Standard ways of working are used so that they can understand what is being done and can do their job properly.

Maintenance
A further consideration is how projects such as a software application will be maintained in the future. All software has a fixed life span. An application will not always be as it started out in life and will have to be updated or modified at some point in the future, perhaps because of a change in the law, or because a customer wants to add some extra features, or so that a customer can make use of some new technology, for example. Changing software would be very difficult indeed if the documentation associated with an application was completed in a non-standard way. It is highly unlikely that the workers making changes in the future would be the same people who designed the product in the first place, and even if they were, they probably would have forgotten what they originally did and why they made those decisions.

Professional standards
Professional standards involve writing procedures to cover every aspect of the development, use and maintenance of a computer system, or to use existing accepted industry-standard ways of working. Each member of a team is expected to adhere to these procedures and not work in their own particular way. There are all kinds of standards that workers might have to follow when designing a software application. Here are some examples:

    • Use standard ways of laying out diagrams e.g. use standard symbols in flow diagrams.
    • Use naming conventions in a program e.g. for variables, function & array names.
    • How new functions and procedures will be written so they can be used in other programs.
    • How code is to be laid out and documented and how software updates will be carried out.
    • How a change in design is agreed and managed so the design documents reflect the product.
    • For the team writing user and technical documents, stating rules for font size and style, paper margins, spacing rules, the use of headings, paragraphs, diagrams and so on will ensure far more consistent documents than if everyone used their own style.
    • All documents will typically be written and re-written many times. There needs to be a system to control the different versions of documents, so everyone knows which one is the latest one.
    • How bugs and suggestions are to be reported, evaluated, carried out, tested and released, with updated documentation. 

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