Define Terms and Rules

Think about that, a new project will be started or a new development team will be created. No mather what will happen. If you are leader of team or project, you should define some terms and rules "with team members". One person shouldn't decide every details.

Each developer, engineer, designer and project manager has own style. It's so common, there is no wrong with that. Each person involved in any project has different skills, experiences. If they are free to apply their own style in same project, ultimately, it will be fail, no doubt. That's the big question how do we prevent unavoidable failure? Keep reading.



Team members including manager, leader, customers anyone who is in project has to talk same "project language". Communication between team members is really more important than choosing technology to be used. If there is a lack communication, there are lots of missunderstanding and it causes big issues which are technical, cost, deadline etc. In my opinion communication is a key pillar of project. For good communication, some terms and rules should be defined before starting project. Look at these example:

Example 1:
There is an object to contains record, stored procedure, functions etc. inside it. In MS SQL enviroment it's called "database" while in MySQL it's called "schema".

Example 2:
If one object is not initialized in .NET Enviroment, developer who uses vb.net says, "nothing", while developer who uses C# says "null". VB.NET developers say "function", C# developers say "method".

You may think they are unimportant points, but misunderstanding may cause big issues.

Also, some technical rules should be written, such as "naming convention". In same project, same naming convention rules should be used. Hungarian, pascal, camel case etc. . More than one naming convention can be used in same project. For instance, hungarian convention can be used for local variables, for public variables pascal case can be used or camel case can be used for parameters.

Another example can be "words" written in project proposal or concept. These terms written below can be identified:

• Customer ; which person is called customer?
  
• User; which person is called user?
• Name,-surname or first name-last name; which one is choosen?
  
• Postcode or zipcode; which one is used?
• Which term is used "authorization" or "roles"?
  

These list can be expanded in respect of your needs. It's not possible to identify all items in one meeting session. It can be boring. During development process, it's always possible to define these terms which are not defined.