Mark Shuttleworth, of Thawte fortune and Ubuntu fame, has some (IMHO) neat ideas on how to manage software development efforts that may be interesting to spend a few human processing cycles considering.
http://lwn.net/Articles/292031
Despite the article being written for Free Software and Linux, I think it’s incredibly relevant to all development efforts – read it as if he’s talking about Molecular projects, and not Linux distributions.
Here are two key paragraphs:
One of the key requirements that Shuttleworth sees is the need to “keep the trunk pristine”, by doing integration on the trunk and feature development on branches. Along with this is the need for more and better tests. While not necessarily believing in test-driven development, he certainly leans that way. In any case, all the tests should pass before committing to the trunk.
Many projects do not yet have an extensive test suite, but this needs to change. He quoted a Chinese proverb that “the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is today”. He mentioned that he is working on a robot that controls the trunk of a development tree. Developers will request it to merge from a branch, so the robot merges the branch and runs all the tests. If the tests pass, it commits, otherwise it gets kicked back to the developer.
This approach sounds pretty good to me.
Shuttleworth on Project Management by Craig Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
