I work in a small group that have been developing and maintaining reasonably complex Talend-based apps for a couple of years. The group is located in a number of locations (in different countries). We have, of necessity, developed some informal practices, but we are now finding that we need to capture the lessons learnt (usually the hard way) in a more formal way. We are doing this through a Smart Practice Initiative – this is ‘smart’ rather than ‘best’ as it aims to just formalise practices that will make a significant difference – in other words, the ‘low hanging fruit’. We are now working on an early draft of the guide and testing it with the developers. We wondered whether anyone else is in a similar situation. We would be really interested in ideas about how and what should be done. We would also be happy to share the results of our work, if anyone is interested. Please get in touch if you are.
Shong,
Thank you for your reply. Looking at your link, we realised we needed to make clear that it is not the 'Software Development Life Cycle' we are documenting but rather the smart (best) practice for writing and maintaining the jobs (code). To make this clear, I have changed the post's title to 'Smart (Best) Practice Coding Style Guide'.
There is this page in your link (
3.1 Designing Jobs) which touches on some of the issues we are dealing with in this project, but we are aiming for a greater level of detail. To give you some idea of what we have been doing, I list the main topics in our guide below:
[list=*]
General Coding Good Practice
Architecture Design
Naming Conventions
Formatting
- Job Diagrams
- Code
Component Usage
Logging
We did find some other threads that discuss smart (best) practice, but none really addressed our particular needs. A selection linked here:
[list=*]
The aim of our project is to evolve a practice that helps to ensure that when one of the developers picks up a job to maintain or enhance that they can easily read and understand it - even though it has been created and maintained by other developers. There is no need to guess at what conventions have been followed. To make it easy to ensure the practices/conventions are followed, we have tried to describe them in ways that can be checked automatically and we have developed a job (a static code analysis tool) that can look over the Talend workspaces and check them for consistency with these conventions.
