Monday, February 09, 2009

Naming Conventions

The raison to write this article is because I still see many multi-nationals struggling with naming conventions within their IT department.

Naming conventions are as old as IT itself, but still many companies do not have proper naming conventions, and even worse, they use internal of external sources to create one.

What is the reason to have Naming Conventions in the first place?
The main reason to introduce naming conventions is to :

  • - to reduce the effort needed to read  and understand source code
  • - to enhance source code appearance

The most important reason is the first one, to reduce the effort needed to read and understand source code

Code must be easy and quick readable and understandable when new employees (internal of external) enters the IT department or when other teams takes over the project..

The answer I gave to my customers is very easy: take the naming conventions found on the Internet.  The goal is not only to have company related Naming conventions, but general naming conventions.

New employees or external consultancy will loose less time understanding the general naming conventions, as they were used too with their previous work, instead of learning the company related ones, which will never be followed 100%.

Some links:

BizTalk: http://wes.fehler.ca/weblog/biztalk/2005/01/biztalk-naming-conventions.html

General Naming Conventions: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229002.aspx

And many more are available on the net. 

 

Don’t let your IT department loose time to write company related naming conventions, re-use them!