| Personal anecdote: At one of the first programming companies I started at, there were no coding/database standards. When we decided we needed them, we appointed a few people to go over all the commonly used standards and present them to the group. As we went over each standard, we either accepted it, rejected it, or proposed alternatives as a group. Often, we would have multiple people arguing different sides over each issue. Generally, it was just a case of someone being used to doing things a certain way, but having no real justifiable reason. In those cases we ended up voting on the outcome. In the end, we had pretty good standards (in my opinion). While this wasn't consensus-driven, it ended up being strongly accepted in the company. I think this was because everyone was involved in the process, and you had a positive say in at least 1 or 2 of the standards that made it. Of course, eventually we added commit hooks to sniff out if you weren't following the standards :p Sorry, there's no real point I'm making here... Every company since then (except my current one), management just "decides" how standards/processes are going to be and announces it. Those usually ended up not being adopted. |