You need a corporate framework

If you are working in a big enough software development team you probably agree that consistency in the code and development practices is very important.  Consistency is what makes you save time when joining a new project or reviewing somebody else code, or what saves ops team time when they deploy a new module and have to figure out how to monitor it, or what saves analytics team time when they have to understand and use the logs & metrics generated by a new component.

To be able to get certain degree of consistency (and quality at the same time) it is very common these days to have coding guidelines, technical plans, training plans, code reviews....  All those practices are very important and help a lot to achieve certain degree of consistency, but in my opinion they don't solve some of the most important problems and in addition they depend a lot on human responsibility (bad, very bad, you shouldn't trust any human).

So let's try to figure out what are some of the problems we have today.  Is any of these problems familiar to you?

• You start a new project and you don't know what folders to create (should I create doc and test folders), how to name things (is it test or tests, src or lib?), should I use jasmine or mocha for testing, should I put the design of this component in a wiki page, a gdocs or a .txt in a folder, where do I put configuration, should I mention the third party licenses somewhere ...
• Each component logs different things, with different names and in different format.  Do all your components log every request and response? Do they use WARN and ERROR consistently?  Do you always use the same format for logging?  I've seen teams using as many logging libraries as components they have.  The cost of not having good consistent logging can easily make a company waste hundreds of thousands of dollars very quickly.
• Half of the components don't have a health or monitoring endpoint, or if they have it the amount of information shown or the format is totally inconsistent.   One service expose the average response time, the other the P99, the other only counters...  It makes hard (if not impossible) to monitor components so at the end nobody pays attention to them until a customer complains.
• My retries strategy sucks.   Do you always retry when you make requests to third party components (very common with the popularization of "microservices" architectures)?  All your components do the same amount of retries?  The timeout before retrying is always the same?  Do you retry against a different server instance?
• The configuration of each component is different.    One use XML, the other JSON, the other env variables?   In some components it can be changed on the fly while in others it can't?  In some components the config is in git, in others in chef recipes, in others in external configuration servers?
• Do you have any service registration and service discovery solution?  Or some services are registered in a database, others in a config file, others in the load balancer configuration file?

Use the force Luke!

What you need is a corporate framework and a corporate project template.

You don't even need to create your own framework.  The best example of this kind of framework I know would be Finagle from Twitter and other teams like Tumblr, Pinterest or Foursquare are reusing it.

Finagle enforces a design to build Scala services (Futures based), it provides a TwitterServer class that automatically exposes a stats endpoint and read configuration properties from command line arguments, includes support for distributed logging,  provides lot of clients (MySQL, HTTP, Redis...) exposing a consistent API and automatically generating logs and statistics, integrates with zookeeper for seamless registration and discovery of services.    If you don't know it I highly recommend you to take a look.

I tried to implement my own framework some months ago (https://github.com/ggarber/snap).  It is very rudimentary (the maturity level of a hackathon project) but I'm using it in production to test if it is really helpful and even at the level of immaturity it has I found it very helpful (I don't need to care much about consistency anymore and it also saved me time).

The other piece I think it is mandatory is to have project template.   It avoids you having to make decisions and should have a reasonable amount of tools integrated to automatically run tests, review styles, initiate a pull request... and maybe even deploy.

This project template can be an Eclipse plugin, a yeoman generator or something else, but if you don't have one I don't understand why :)  As an example for node.js projects I like this one created by a friend: https://github.com/luma/generator-tok

Hopefully I convinced you of how important is to have a corporate framework and project template that you use for all your components.    Feedback is more than welcomed.     And contributors for the snap framework (https://github.com/ggarber/snap) even more! :)