Teams

Richard Gaskin ambassador at fourthworld.com
Tue Aug 5 11:36:00 EDT 2003


Troy Rollins wrote:

> I'm curious if anyone on this list actively develops software in teams
> (more than actively coding developer, plus other support people), and
> what techniques you are employing for maintaining a synchronized
> modular team project - ideally through a server.
> 
> This functionality is pretty important if you have more than one
> developer on a team.
> 
> Anyone doing anything in this way?
> 
> (NOTE : The "RBPM" mentioned above works (if it worked) much like
> WebDav, with the ability to log in to a project, check out specific
> items for editing, and maintain synchronization of the latest versions.
> Like CVS but more simple and seamless.)

Amen to that.  WebDAV is a mess.

Given Rev's capabilities it wouldn't take more than a couple days to have a
basic version that provides a check-in/check-out mechanism at the substack
level, which should be sufficient for most projects.

I've been daydreaming of this as an open source project, but when I snap out
of my Walter Mitty moment I realize I don't have the spare non-billable time
right now myself. :)

In the meantime, I've worked in teams of four or five with Rev stuff and we
did it with no special tools at all.  We used a modular aproach with
multiple stack files, having defined a few rules about how the parts fit
together and what's expected from each.  Each module had an owner, and the
modules were prioritized according to how commonly they are used throughout
the system.  Only two of us lived in the same city, and with nothing more
than an FTP repository, email, and a good long-distance rate it seemed to go
well.

It may sound primitive and indeed it was, remembering that the root of
"primitive" is "prime".  The coordination among less than half a dozen
people is usually just simple enough to allow this sort of flow to work
well.

If you have a project with maybe a dozen or more developers it may get out
of hand, but even then tools will only do so much:  as Steve McConnel points
out in "Rapid Development", if a single programmer has a productivity we can
quantify as X, the second will add .5X and so on.  The generic overhead of
communication/coordination between team members is increased
disproportionately as team size grows, and every project has a theoretical
limit after which you have a case of diminishing returns.

I'm a big fan of keeping teams as small as possible given constaints on the
timeline, and for small teams you may not need any specialized tools beyond
FTP, email, a telephone, and an occassional white board.

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
 Developer of WebMerge: Publish any database on any Web site
 ___________________________________________________________
 Ambassador at FourthWorld.com       http://www.FourthWorld.com
 Tel: 323-225-3717                       AIM: FourthWorldInc




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