There are three major staff costs in the life of an IT project - the specification and development of the system, the maintainance and upgrading of the system though its life, and the investment that's made in data entry and integrity through the life of the system. And although there's a lot of thought put into the cost of developing a new system, that element is actually the smallest of the three. Ongoing upgrade / repair / maintainaince ends up costing more that the initial development. And the user's work on the data will end up being a bigger investment than the other two elements put together.

So it is important - REALLY important - to write the initial code in such a way that it can easily be amended through its life, and in such a way that it puts the user experience and efficiency as high priorities in the implementation. And to assist with that, a coding standards document is an excellent starting point and set of guidelines.

We have such a set of standards for Perl on our web site (here). And haveing such standards is particularly important for Perl - you'll see why on the standards description.

A correspondent writes:

"I am an employee in a CMM level5 company and I am asked to create a document regarding PERL and UNIX(shell scripts) coding standard.I found your site very useful to draft a document regarding PERL coding standards. Can you please provide similar help for preparing UNIX(shell scripts)."

And my reply:

I'm glad you found our site useful with regards to setting of Perl standards; it's a language in which programmers can write code that is utterly unmaintainable, as well as really clear and clean code, and a good set of standards should be at the core of any organisation's Perl strategy.

With regards to Shell programming, we don't have a similar set of documents available. Shell programs are typically much shorter and the issues of maintaining medium size to large scripts are far less common. In addition, the number of overlapping facilities and ability to shorten code in shell to the point it becomes hard to understand is far less. There are also numerous different shells, with each really needing its own set.

I'm afraid I don't have the free time to simply sit down and draw up a standard document, but I would be happy to put a day aside under our "extra" training scheme that would allow you and me to draw up a set of such standards together. The cost of such a day is 350.00 pounds + UK VAT at 17.5%. There are further notes on these days at (here).

The offer of mine is a real bargain - an astonishing offer in fact. But that's because I really want to help encourage quality coding. Here at Well House Consultants, we'll train you on not only how to program in Perl / PHP / Python / Ruby / Tcl, but also how to make the very best of those languages in writing maintainable code, with reusable modules / packages to save recoding, and with major thought to the user experience too.
(written 2007-09-11 08:16:30)

 Q904 - Object Orientation and General technical topics - Analysing a Programming Task
Q909 - Object Orientation and General technical topics - Object Orientation: Composite Objects
P711 - An Introduction to Standards in Perl
A167 - Web Application Deployment - Shell Programming

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Forward to Evening, Devizes and Sells Green

Cash is not an acceptable way of paying
Screw it or Glue it? Access to Object variables - a warning
Wireless Internet Access at hotels - an update and some pitfalls
Evening, Devizes and Sells Green
Perl and Shell coding standards / costs of an IT project
Catching up on indexing our resources
Melksham Laundrette
Google, wwmdirectory, Freshwater, ATP - new scam?
Moving to Melksham? Househunting map.
Tk locks up - 100% c.p.u. on a simple program (Tcl, Perl, Python)
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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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