Decentralised Development Approach & Version Control
Decentralised development means giving each developer their own workspace: the ability to code in isolation of the rest of the team, to experiment and when their happy, easily share their changes with others in the team. But the fundamental reason for moving to a distributed environment where each developer has their own private workspace is to implement version control. Without version control effective code management is impossible.
Looking for compelling reasons to make the move? You might consider the following:
- Private workspace for development
- Complete history of all code changes, including deletes
- Visibility on others specific modifications
- Enable parallel development on the same code base
- Manage multiple versions of the same code base (critical for shared code libraries, custom tags, etc)
- Confidence when deploying new builds to production
- Confidence rolling back to earlier builds in production
- Reporting on changes by developer (great for managers, team leads, and KPIs)
Are you working in a shared, central, development server without version control? Tackling the move to a decentralised environment will be frustrating but well worth the effort.
What’s holding you back?
Comments
Luke on 24-Jul-07 12:17 PM
This sounds great but...
There are a lot of development shops out there that do not see the value in this way of working. Sometimes the development department is just ignorant but most of the time management or company philosophy plays a crucial role in not having a system like this. There are a lot of web development shops out there that do not consider themselves "software" development companies. Of course we both know this is not the case. Developing for the web is software development as well. Usually these companies see them selfs as "creative" or "idea" companies and label them selves as "digital" or "interactive" or, must keep myself from laughing, "integrated". Software development is seen as uncool and all that fancy version control stuff is rocket scientists. They say; "we are not software developers, we are not a software company, we don't need those systems , we need Macs and all will be good!". Another crucial role is that introducing such an important system as you describe will have a great impact on the knowledge that is currently in a company. Changing a system means that people (management?) need to change as well. Learing new things is always scary because you might have to ask questions and feel stupid in the mean time. I totally agree with what you are saying, but it isn't always this simple even if you want to do it the right way.