Before starting on the actual development of hms_sys, there are several decisions that need to be made. In a real-world scenario, some (maybe all) of these decisions might be made at a policy level, either by the development team or maybe by management above the team. Some, such as the IDE/code editor program, might be an individual decision by each individual team member; so long as there are no conflicts between different developers' choices, or any issues raised as a result, there's nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, having some consistency isn't a bad thing either; that way, every team member knows what to expect when they're working on code that someone else on the team has touched.

These choices fall into two main categories selection of development tools and what best practices (and standards) will be in play, specifically the following:

• Integrated Development Environment options
• Source Control Management options
• Code and development process standards, including organization of Python code into packages
• Setting up and using of Python virtual environments