Creating and Using Templates

Do you really need 50 different ways to name variables? Each developer has his own favorite way of accomplishing a task, and practically everyone will happily agree to discuss the standards he uses.

Shared templates provide all team members with an important basis for collaboration. When each person performs the task in his own way, you can forget about cooperation. Often, the developer is afraid to ask for help from another person, because he may not agree with his approach. And when there is no cooperation, such differences in approaches may impede common understanding and the accumulation of knowledge and experience.

Quality Control activities ( analysis , reviews and testing ) will bring more benefits and be more productive if the product was made using a common model. Without their use, reviewers and testers will simply try to catch problems wherever the developer’s hand is concerned. Such an unsystematic approach to quality control requires more effort and leads to poor coverage and poor detection of defects.

General templates contribute to the improvement of technical work . A developer who performs tasks in his own way can easily miss important details or information. When the work is standardized, there are no questions that the work done should include.

Standards should be applied when writing test plans, specifications, user interfaces, documentation, training materials and other products, because A general vision of how a project should be made can help ensure its quality. But along with the standards, it is necessary to determine the situations of their use and develop guidelines for adapting the standards to the needs of the organization, if necessary. Any standard you adopt should help you do your job as best you can and should not tie your hands.