With more than 25 years in IT, this is what I have learned:
*People remember quick for a day; they remember dirty forever.*
- When I talked to a former CIO about quality and documentation, he
said management expects best practices, and it is up to us programmers to
deliver them.
- We need to quit saying we can get it done "quick in a day" when it
is a week-long job.
- I have noticed that some programmers inflate their estimates by 10
times, just so they will look good finishing early. We have to be accurate,
without lying.
- Companies need to establish a threshold to determine when an
application needs to be rewritten. This could be "n years old" or "n
modifications" or when the program is unreadable.
- The best IT practices I've seen include:
- Coding standards (e.g. using loop/repeat instead of for/next)
- Syntax standards (e.g. using @true and @false instead of 1 and
0)
- Everybody uses the same case: UPPER, lower, or Mixed.
- peer review for coding and syntax compliance (this really
doesn't take long)
- operations and user review of documentation BEFORE a program
is installed.
- programs are never installed on Friday.
We have many members and companies that have established excellent best
practices. It would be nice to have them on the U2UG wiki.
-- Louie in Seattle
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