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How do you manage your project life cycle?
For example: Do you start with a template? Do you use versioning such as SVN as the authoritative source? Do you archive the projects, if so when and how? When a project is revived (work resumes), how’s that handled? Do you use automated scripts to do things such as create IIS sites, DBs, archive, launch, etc?
Of particular interest is management of many projects at varying points of development.
Development: We do not start with a template, because the world changes quick enough to make template maintenance a full time job. We do encourage everybody to use the same IDE (Eclipse), so that they can help eachother with their environments.
Project Management: We are using GForge to manage our projects. Sourceforge is slightly better, but GForge is much cheaper and has a different licensing fee model. GForge incorporates CVS, SVN, Document storage, Issue trackers and integrates everything nicely. This makes it easy to see where the project is at. Open issues, and closed issues with connected code changes, everything is integrated.
Versioning: Although we tried SVN, we switched back to CVS because it fits our needs better and works fine.
Backups: Our GForge server, housing all our projects and sourcecode, is running on a VMWare EX server. Backups are done daily on VM level and we make VM snapshots if we feel that we need more frequent restore points for some reason.
Reviving projects: This is very common in our business. Every project has all it’s libraries and build requirements in CVS. The project always has an up-to-date development manual which describes all the steps to get a development environment running, and has a chapter with all the things which are not default, to pay attention to. We try to build software in an as-default-as-possible environment so that developers don’t have to spend days tweaking their settings.
Nearly all projects are built using Maven, which also makes life easy for our developers. Ususally reviving a projects only takes a few steps:
Builds: All our projects are built on a seperate build server. Every morning the build server does a complete build and tags CVS if all unittests succeed. During the day, hourly builds are made and when there are failures the team automatically gets an email. Usually we use one build server per project, and it is a simple luntbuid server (Linux, Tomcat, Luntbuild).
Both the buildserver and sometimes even the developer machines are VM’s. This makes reviving a project really easy. Get the VM from the fileserver, start it up, and you’re good to go.
The build server creates daily sites which show unittest coverage statistics, complexity measurements, CVS activity and developer activity (who changed what and when).
All our software comes with self-building database scripts built in. Point the config file to the database, start the software, and it figures out what it needs to do to the database itself. This really comes in handy because the buildserver can just start the software. No special steps needed. Our customers are also happy, they never need to worry about their database, or upgrade scripts.
The whole project lifecycle is managed, documented and tracked in GForge, with the addition of some external spreadsheets for budget tracking because that’s simply easier.
Wether you have an integrated project server or not, I think it is really important to have a system. This enables you to switch developers between projects without them getting lost. It saves time. Particularly when a customer comes back to you after 2 or 3 years for modifications on old software (yes, that happens).
All the stuff we use is open source (you can even use an open source fork of GForge). It’s not in the tools, it’s how you use them.