Standards

[TedHolt]

I’m curious about the setting of programming standards in IBM i shops.

The main question on my mind is the format of the standards manual. A Word document? Web pages? A wiki? Other?

The second question is the standards themselves. What’s required? Encouraged? Prohibited?

Thanks in advance for any comments.

[Ghost +]

For distribution:
I'd recommend a wiki/webpage/cloud based editor. I'm now setting up standards with my current employer and chose to use Confluence for the distribution as it allows multiple contributors and is easy to maintain/search/access from anywhere.

For the standards themselves:
Of what not to do: My previous company had a word document that was about 60-80 pages long and dictated everything from naming of variables to what loop types were allowed to be used. While I'm an avid rule follower, I would personally not recommend such strict standards and allow some freedom of expression while keeping your codebase readable.

There are some great examples online for other languages to look for inspiration. One in particular is https://www.php-fig.org/psr/ in particular the basic guidelines with the extended coding style guide, however there are many more at https://github.com/Kristories/awesome-guidelines.
Off the top of my head, I believe the following would be helpful to begin with

• declaring variables at the top of a procedure/program


• naming style of constants/variables


• guidelines on library and program naming conventions


• encourage reusability by promoting service programs