I suggest you fix the root of the problem and force people to use a single standard. Perferably one that makes everyone equally unhappy. Remember: Its all but impossible to please everyone, but its quite easy to get everyone pissed off.

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I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

I suggest you fix the root of the problem and force people to use a single standard.

And on that day, Satan will luge to work. Would that I could. Let me just say that the reason these people are in charge of STANDARDS is that they cannot be trusted with code. In fact, I'm not sure they could be trusted with snake control in Ireland.

Really, the problem isn't the single standard in and of itself (though it does show that the wild west days are long gone). A lot of the problem is that 1) a new tub-thumping paradigm will cause their STANDARDS to shift, or 2) the documentation is so thick (over 200 pages so far) that it's impossible to catch everything. It's a human issue, but I am dealing with drones, not humans. Amongst realistic solutions, the least bad right now is to have a tool that does this for me.

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tbone1
Ain't enough 'O's in 'stoopid' to describe that guy.
- Dave "the King" Wilson

But....that is a cure for the symptom, not the problem and is a bit akin to turning up your radio so you don't hear the strange noise from the transmission

I would humbly suggest you meet with these folks, share with them the difficulties of change management in the environment they have created and come to an alignment on how to manage this system efficently moving forward.

The issue here is bad management practices...address that and save yourself the long-term grief.

The issue here is bad management practices...address that and save yourself the long-term grief.

And of course, the management likes the STANDARDS thing because they think it makes them look professional and looks like they are doing something. Nevermind that we spend more time conforming to arbitrary standards than we do developing money-making software. *sigh*

I think Al McGuire was right; the world is run by C students.

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tbone1
Ain't enough 'O's in 'stoopid' to describe that guy.
- Dave "the King" Wilson

Actually, I think it is the Peter Principle at work.

However, you have a responsibilty to your company to point out the inaccuracy of these assumptions.

The trick will be to do so without seeming to be a pain in the posterior.

Is there anyone else in your organization who sides with you on this issue?
If so, perhaps you could approach management, in a kind way, to let them know you are concerned about how these bad pracitices are impacting productivity and the bottom line.

Nevermind that we spend more time conforming to arbitrary standards than we do developing money-making software.

If you can quantify this, and then translate it into dollars lost versus dollars saved, you'd have a case to bring to management to at least reduce the frequency of changes if not reduce the number of changes altogether.

Example:

• how many minutes per day do you spend making changes to conform to standards?
• how many minutes are spent by the committee reviewing and changing the standards?
• how many people are in the committee?
1. measure these items over the course of one month.
2. compute the number of hours
3. compute the amount of money spent by multiplying the hours by the average hourly wage (you'll have to figure this out yourself)
4. multiply this number by 12 to get the yearly estimated cost
here's the kicker, ask them how much of this money being spent is benefiting the customer!

HTH

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hiseldl
What time is it? It's Camel Time!

This has a good take on STANDARDS...the Advertising STANDARDS Authority upheld a complaint about the British STANDARDS Institute. Basically, InternationalSTANDARDSOrganisation9001 includes every metric going *except* the ones needs to measure the benefit (or not!) of undergoing ISO9001 - the primary business STANDARDS measurement can't actually *prove* that it itself does a company any good.

Cheers, Ben.