Tool Creation Guidelines for High Performance Teams

Tool Creation Guidelines for High Performance Teams

 

The objective of these guidelines are to clearly identify what is desired of a tool for use in fast moving teams with clear objectives.

 

- Minimize necessary user actions/input

- Minimize the Tool purpose

    --> if a tools has multiple functions consider breaking them into smaller tools.

- Avoid a GUI when possible

    --> Good GUI design is hard and creation process is time-consuming, as there is no clear "right" answer.
    --> If a GUI is necessary, create a 'core' component with clear intefaces so that the GUI can be easily added, but still not necessary.

- Tools should be scriptable regardless of the language it was written in.

    --> A command line interface is sufficient.

- Tools should run on linux. 

- Tools may run on windows

- Tools should have a built-in help, explaining basic operation

- Tools should have a README, explaining all user-facing features

- Tools may have detailed documentation with location clearly stated in the README (... but if needed, your tool is probably too complicated already)

- Tools should output to common formats:

    - SQL DATABASE (Postgresql, etc)

    - CSV

    - GEOJSON

- Tools should avoid misdirection [via extended referencing or deeply defined, hard to find functions ] (this is the stuff of magic, and only leads to confusion)

- Tools should have testcases! (include small sample set data with the tool project)