suggestions for CVS use

Erik Price eprice at ptc.com
Fri May 9 11:24:12 EDT 2003


Jason Stephenson wrote:

> You know, the above reveals a serious flaw in development methodology 
> that is used by many corporations and most Open Source projects. 
> Ideally, when working on a large project, it should be split up into 
> subprojects or modules with clear interfaces between them. Any one 
> developer should be assigned a module to work on and that individual 
> should not be working on someone else's module. This way, conflicts, in 
> the source code control sense, never happen.

I have been reading an amazing book, "Agile Software Development: 
Patterns, Principles, and Practices" by Robert Martin.  A part of the 
book discusses Extreme Programming.  Martin makes a case against what 
you suggest above.  But before you take this as a disagreement, let me 
just mention (for those who aren't familiar) that Extreme Programming 
would be a difficult methodology to use in an open source project or a 
large corporation since a big emphasis of XP is working together in 
person and keeping in constant contact.  Whereas OSS projects tend to be 
distributed and connected by mailing lists and incubators like Apache, 
Tigris, Sourceforge etc, an XP-using group is more like a focused SWAT 
team that works in very close proximity and is constantly aware of what 
the rest of the group is doing.  Roles and responsibilities are traded 
off at frequent intervals, so you never have "the GUI guy" or "the DB 
guy" -- while there might be a GUI specialist, that person becomes a 
mentor when it's the DB specialist's turn to work on the GUI.  I can 
imagine how this would be difficult for a larger corporation such as you 
describe above.

BTW there is more to this book than just a discussion of XP techniques 
(that is a small part of the book actually).  I am really getting a lot 
of insight from it and I'm only on page 150.  I might even go so far as 
to say it's one of the best books I've read, though I'm less than 
halfway through.





Erik




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