House Style
Every publication has it's house style. Tabloid newspapers use short, declarative sentences, limited vocabulary, and lots of emotive language. Academic journals all prefer their text to be in the third person. Orthography varies too, the house style always defines layout, fonts etc.
Similarly, a development team/organisation often has a requirement for the following:
- bracing style
- naming conventions
- comments / inline documentation
In environments that lack a house style document, I've sometimes written one up by querying the preferred style with the existing team. It makes code easier to read and more consistent.
Editorial requirements
This is more something that should be, than something that is. Code review often tends to be neglected, mainly because project timescales are often tight. For reasons why that is the case, see Frederick Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month". If you follow Brooks' advice of having one person integrating code, they're effectively doing the job that a publication editor/subeditor does - checking that content is formatted correctly, readable, fits with house style and so on, to make a consistent product.
Specialisms and research
Everyone has their specialities. I specialise in Assistive/Care oriented Technology, identity management, web services and a few other less well defined things. I speak Java, Perl, PHP, Javascript, and to a lesser extent Ruby.
But like a journalist called upon to write outside their speciality with good research disciplines and care a developer can do a decent job outside their immediate speciality, or learn a new one rapidly. The economics correspondent can do a decent job of reporting political stories, and the server developer can make a decent job of web development if needed.
Any others?
I'm sure there must be other parallels. I'll update this post if I think of any.
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