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Starting next month, I'm going to be taking part in a project at ETSI
(European Telecoms Standards Institute) writing some documents providing
guidance to ETSI's technical committees on "making better standards".
A large part of the project will be concerned with formal methods for
specifying and testing protocols, using UML, ASN.1, SDL and TTCN. (If you
don't know what those abbreviations mean, count yourself very fortunate, and
try and keep it that way!)
However, it rather belatedly occurred to the powers-that-be that while
formal methods are very useful, 80% or more of ETSI's standards are still
written in English! So I have the job of writing the part of the document
that deals with writing standards in English, which I suspect is the only
bit that will be read by most of the target audience.
I've been involved in writing standards in the telecoms industry for almost
my whole working life, so I have a good number of ideas as to what needs to
be said in this document, (and a good many thoughts on the shortcomings of a
lot of existing ETSI standards!) but I'm always open to new ideas. So, if
you have any experience of writing or using standards (ETSI, ANSI, IETF,
IEC, ISO, CENELEC, ITU, 3GPP, ECMA etc) and have any particular gripes,
thoughts, complaints or any other kinds of ideas, I would be most grateful
to hear them.
I'm especially interested in the thoughts of those of you who are landed
with the job of trying to read, understand and implement the standards
rather than just those who write them. I suspect that far too many standards
are written an a way that makes them all but impenetrable to anyone other
than those who participated in the committee that wrote them. If you are a
standards user, then I particularly want to hear from you.
I'm not able to chase into technical issues on individual standards, but
would be willing to obtain and look at individual documents if they can be
used to illustrate a more general point.
Regards
Jonathan West
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