Developing a structured set of standards (software engineering)

Standards need to be short, coherent, readable and easy to change. In practice, these goals are hard to achieve, because the underlying information is complex and interrelated. Common mistakes in developing standards include over-large documents, unreadable style, mixed levels of abstraction, lack of structure across sets of documents, and repetition of information across different standards. The European Space Agency (ESA) has been developing a structured set of software engineering standards, and the experience is abstracted to help future standards writers. Many principles were followed subconsciously while developing the ESA standard, but have become clearer in retrospect. A systematic approach should make for a better product with less effort.<>