Define Development Standards

Use

The purpose of this task is to establish the basic standards for development projects. This includes standards on naming conventions, screen layout, documentation, and modification.

Procedure

  1. Define naming conventions for development projects.
    By defining naming conventions, you avoid naming conflicts and give your Repository objects meaningful names. Naming conflicts can be avoided by customer name spaces, or by namespace reservation using the Workbench Organizer (maintain view V_TRESN) and using the SAPNet - R/3 Frontend (maintain view V_TRNSPACE).
    You should use this opportunity to establish naming conventions for all names and parts of names that SAP is not concerned about (for example program names beyond the Y or Z, variant names, forms, and so on.)
  1. Define your own screen layout style guide.
    SAP provides a style guide to help you standardize your user interface design using ergonomic principles. The SAP style guide lets you design customer screens and menus along the same lines as those in SAP applications.
  1. Define documentation standards for repository objects.
    You have already described how project and end user documentation has to be written. The third pillar of documentation is technical documentation of individual repository objects. You can refine the technical design by writing additional documentation online (within the program source) or at the Repository object (for example, in the function module).
  1. Ensure compliance with global naming standards. The Global Development Strategy Document that was developed during the strategy initiative must be thoroughly reviewed and the naming standards in that document must be complied with.
  1. Establish the standards that the developer should follow when implementing modifications or new work.

For example:

  1. Define and establish transport directory paths.
    These directories will be available from all application servers. It is necessary to do this to ensure that interfaces and data migration programs find the data files.
  2. Define file usage conventions - physical filename and logical filename.
    Evaluate whether to use logical filenames or physical filenames for your interfaces and data migration programs.
  3. Standardize usage of no-data character.
    SAP supports user-defined no-data characters to indicate initial or default values for the fields of the data files that would be used for interfaces and data migrations. It is a good idea to standardize the use of this field. Please note that few SAP programs do not support the no-data character. This is documented in the no-data characters. In these cases, the no-data character would be SPACE and not ‘/’.
  4. Standardize use file types - text or binary.
    It is very important to decide the file types that will be used for the data migrations and interfaces data files. This needs to be decided for all the developments in and outside SAP to ensure that files and their data elements get interpreted correctly.

You can use the following tools to help you carry out this task:

Result