A Programming Development Environment for SAS Programs

Organizing the programming effort for large projects can be a daunting task. Programming teams are under pressure to complete work accurately and rapidly, while using standard templates and macros whenever possible. Add to that several levels of documentation and a manager’s need for frequent status updates and you have an administrative nightmare. A system is necessary to integrate programming documentation, validation checklists, and real-time status reports. After deciding to centralize our project management spreadsheet, program header documentation, and validation documents in a database, we found that we had the beginnings of a web-based programming development environment (PDE) for SAS programs.