Reality of Large Corp Coding

I really enjoyed the article "Corporate Web Standards"
today, not only for the primary thoughts, but also the secondary discussion of corporate
smells. [http://www.digital-web.com/articles/corporate_web_standards/]
(thanks for the link from Elsewhere on the Net [http://www.quirksmode.org/elsewhere/archives/2007/07/index.html#entry1348])

The
author describes a journey to implement web standards, but expresses some large corporation
insight along the way. From youthful exuberance:
"Initial stages of the
project began and soon enough chunks of the project would be completed, neatly packaged, and
passed off to the next stage of design or development. It was a finely tuned assembly
line—we weren't cutting any corners, and were planning each step logically
and carefully during those initial phases.

The code being produced was clean and
semantic."

to experienced anxiety:
"After a few weeks, the
pressure began to build in our isolated building. As the launch date of our initial website
approached, scope creep became a big problem. Stakeholders who signed off on designs
beforehand would start to see final, assembled products and make fundamental architectural
changes, as they had not fully understood the signed-off documents they had approved only
weeks earlier."
"The code became an angry, growing
beast."

Not only can I relate to these statements, from 9 years at multiple
large corporations, but I fully appreciate his attempt to bring everyone together; to get
everyone on the same team.
"We all like to comment our code in different
ways, use different CSS layouts, and apply different naming conventions to our classes and
IDs, but this won't work if you want to work within large project teams and develop to
a company-wide set of standards.

It can actually be quite a difficult step for many
developers to swallow their pride and give up personal coding conventions, and instead agree
on standards that work better for the group as a whole."

I could go on and on
about the high quality of this article, but in the end just read it for yourself. I really
can't do it justice, as the author did a terrific job at expressing the necessary but
difficult task of creating and utilizing large project corporate web standards.