Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008 - (Page 26)

d09ryla_p2as 7/17/08 8:33 AM Page 26 Core Technology by Stephen Rylander Building a Robust Development Environment Stephen is a software engineer at CDW focusing on web scalability and best practices. He is also a founder of the Chicago Architects Group and can be reached at stephen@ontheheap.com. Before the first line of code… In the southwest United States, Native Americans refer to the combination of corn, beans, and squash as the “Three Sisters.” The crops were grown in close proximity because they complemented each other and balanced the nutrients in the soil. This way all three crops could be planted year after year without rotation. Software engineering has its own Three Sisters—sourcecode management, build automation, and human factors—which are as important to the engineering process as nutrients are to soil, and provide the basis for repeatedly shipping excellent software. Gaining insight into these aspects of the engineering process can be a make or break situation for a team. The Three Sisters take time and effort, but yield big results in quality and developer productivity. Having recently led an effort to reconstruct and revitalize the software configuration management process within my company (for our e-commerce website), I can attest to the value that is attainable at many levels of the software engineering process. In this article, I present strategies and insights for source-code management, build automation, and human factors—including tips on how to handle significant project change, regardless of platform. You won’t find the theoretical here. Instead, I present realworld pragmatic practices that have worked. Finding the Source Taking charge of your source code is integral to software engineering. Before I started the design activities 26 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l September 2008 for the new build system, I addressed two glaring issues—an antiquated source-control system and a confusing source-code directory structure. All source code lived inside of Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe, which didn’t provide any benefits beyond a library-like file check-in/check-out system. Replacing this software became a priority and Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) was brought in as a replacement. Although there are many good available source-control systems— Subversion, Perforce, and SurroundSCM come to mind—TFS provides seamless integration with the Visual Studio.NET IDE on every developer desktop. The introduction of TFS provided a new and improved platform for development and build engineering to expand upon. Next, the source structure needed refactoring—the website code was mingled with other company code, using namespaces as a folder naming convention. http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook A Conversation With Erik Demaine Application Lifecycle Management Meets Model-Driven Development Building a Robust Development Environment Real Users Really Matter Matching Wildcards: An Algorithm The Android Mobile Phone Platform Managing Application Thread Use Signalling Integer Overflows in Java .NET Development & the IBM WebSphere Portal Server The Agile Edge Effective Concurrency Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008

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