Recently, I was working on a Friday while my colleagues were not available. I was tasked to create an app registration in Azure which needed certain permissions to be able to add and remove users from a Teams channel through a Power Automate flow. From the surface, this might not seem that difficult. You create an app registration in Azure, you add some API permissions that make the app registration able to add and remove users from a channel, and you create a secret to authenticate to the app registration. But several questions came to mind when I started to go through the steps. What naming convention do we have for app registrations? Do we add our environment name to the app registration? Does this mean we separate app registrations per environment? What are the minimum API permissions I need? I couldn’t find an answer to these questions and spent the next hour searching and thinking about how to continue without knowing which standards my team wanted to follow.

Why standards are important

Freeing up your mental capacity

I didn’t start off in the IT sector but I have a bachelor in hotel management. Yes, that’s something completely different from what I do now. But I did learn valuable lessons which I implement in my life as a consultant and developer. One of those lessons was from a class on operational efficiency. I loved that class and found it extremely interesting. The essence of the class was all about how to increase your operational efficiency and one way of doing this was standardization. It made so much sense to me. The structured and comprehensible style of notation wasn’t just a nice sight to behold, my rationale was when your mind doesn’t have to constantly think about how to note down certain names for components or how policies work you leave mental capacity for the real problems in your work.

Giving new colleagues a flying start

Of course, anybody new in the team would greatly benefit from standardization and policies. Not only would they be able to deliver work that is up to the right standard of the team, it also prevents them to ask you for all the answers, enabling them to work more independently. Having written down the rules of development and security policies makes it easier for everyone to execute their work. Creating a well-oiled working team starts with these standards, even when there are new colleagues that need to be taught the ways of working of the team.

Which standards are important

Naming Conventions for ease of reading

I always say:

I don’t necessarily care what naming convention the team uses, as long as we have one and we use it consistently.

This should be the base rule in the team. Of course, there are some things in a naming convention that could be handy to include or exclude depending on how your Power Platform governance is set up but I have seen several different naming conventions for the same components. Take global variables for instance, I have seen varUserRecord, gblUserRecord and g_UserRecord. In the end, these could all be fine, although the glb prefix might be better, also for its wider use in the community. But, if your team starts to use them interchangeably for different applications it gets messy quickly. Having to switch around your mental capacity from one prefix naming convention to another is just tiring and not efficient.

Security policies

Another great one to consider is security policies. As soon as you start creating app registrations and secrets you might start encountering them. Do you have Azure DevOps pipelines and are you using one app registration with one secret for all your environments? If this secret gets compromised the attacker gains access to all these environments. Maybe it would be better to use different secrets for different environments. But this means you will need to rotate different secrets increasing the administrative load. And this is not even taking into account the expiration time of secrets. Is six months the standard? Or do you just set it to the maximum of two or more years? Eventually, you or somebody else, such as your security officer might decide on these policies. But you will have to implement them in your work. Knowing where to find all these policies and having them written down somewhere will decrease the time it takes for development impediments to get solved, making your developers focus on what’s actually important: developing applications for the business.

How to implement standards and policies

Start writing them down today!

Start today, take a little time to write them down. It doesn’t have to be the full shebang of naming conventions but you need to start somewhere. You will find that the list of variable names you create will need to be updated now and then anyway. We used to not have named formulas but now we do and that requires another prefix to be added to our variable naming conventions. Furthermore, there are several types of software inside the Microsoft Power Platform ecosystem. Canvas apps, Model Driven Apps, Power Pages, Power BI. Only when you start using them you will really need to have the naming conventions. Thus, see the standards and policies as a living document that you continuously update to add new naming conventions.

Use a database that’s easily searchable

Use a database where you can easily search for the standards and policies. Whether it is a Azure DevOps wiki, a shared OneNote or Confluence, make sure everyone can easily search for naming conventions. This also requires you to create a structure in your database that is easy to follow. Make sure you create pages, chapters and anything necessary to guide your team to the rules you’ve set.

Concluding

Maybe a little bit more boring than the technical stuff but still even more important in the long run; standards and policies cannot be forgotten when you want to create a team that works efficient and fast. Standards and policies free up valuable time that can be used for what’s actually important: developing. Start today with writing down your naming conventions and policies and discuss those that aren’t clear. Make sure your team can find the rules easily and you will see that the clarity and structure will increase your speed of development greatly!