Standards, the why, how, when, where
Posted by John Hallas on May 7, 2010
I am preparing a presentation around standards for the UKOUG Unix SIG . This is scheduled for the Tue May 25th at Oracle offices at Blythe Valley (off the M42). I intend talking through the reasons to have standards, how detailed they should be, which is obviously very dependent upon individual requirements and to try and produce a checklist of what we might want in them. To anybody who knows me there will be no surprises when I say that they should be short but usable .
One of the early slides covers reasons why we have standards and I have produced a list of reasons in order of popularity from sites I have worked at. Perhaps a cynical view but one I am sure that some readers will recognise
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‘Management’ think it necessary
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Someone has a copy from another site which they can adapt
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Someone fancies doing the job
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Unix/Wintel/mainframe have one so we must
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We have hit problems before and we want to address them
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We recognise the need for such a document and will use it
I am hoping that I can get some interaction with the audience as I do not want to sound prescriptive and the whole point of having such a document is to enure that it meets the requirements for that site. A colleague is attending with me and apart from briefing him to clap loudly at every opportunity he will be making notes on feedback and audience comments so that I can add them to an update later.
