Enforcing Coding Standards in Global Teams

by Mike Oara
June 25, 2009

Your application portfolio runs your business. It automates core operations from finance to customer management, so it’s critical these systems operate as expected. Outages, security issues, and privacy exposures are significant concerns.

Most development organizations have created best practices to ensure these challenges are avoided by coding, documenting, and delivering high-quality applications. But enforcing these standards has become increasingly difficult as:

• Time pressures have increased, leading to a greater rush to deliver code.
• The global nature of development makes monitoring standards more complex.
• Resource pools are spread across a wider range of applications.
• Formal standards have replaced original standards based on the programming style of legacy personnel.
• Development staff members have left, taking knowledge of standards with them.

This article discusses how managers can monitor and enforce code quality standards across distributed teams. Doing so leads to:

• More understandable applications
• Improved efficiency in debugging applications
• Enhanced application performance and quality
• Reduced time to train new employees
• Easier transition between global development teams.

Aligning With Standards

Coding standards include policies created by management, architectural committees, business analysts, and other stakeholders. Once established, these policies should be applied against existing software assets to identify divergences from standards. As these misalignments are located, managers can prioritize steps to return software— and the processes they automate—into alignment.

Misalignments also can be detected during the software development lifecycle, as development professionals adjust code for maintenance or modernization. Ensuring compliance with policies at early stages in the development lifecycle avoids the costs and risks associated with deploying non-standard code that could compromise efficiency, agility, and stability.

Application Portfolio Reality

The reality of today’s development teams is that they’re globally distributed. Management may be in Europe, architects in India, and development in Brazil. So, it’s important that all departments be able to access the same information about their application portfolio. Such information would include the structure of existing code, the applicable standards, and the results of applying these standards to the code.

Information, when stored in a central repository, can be accessed by remote teams. Development staff at an international location should have access to the same reports, analytics, and intelligence as management located in an office on the other side of the world. Managers can then monitor the quality of the same sources that the development team is programming.