On Monday 23 February 2004 10:37 pm, David Demland wrote:
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> Version control allows for a development centered approach. This works when
> the business processes are young and immature. In this environment the
> focus is on just getting the code out not necessarily what is the system
> doing and in what time frame will it be completed. It is not unusual in
> this environment for code to be produced quickly, but projects seem to
> always be out of control. A good example of this is everyone making
> whatever changes they want when they want.
>
> In a system centered approach, the over all system is looked at and change
> is more controlled. In this environment code output is lower, but the
> projects are under more control. A business that has this type of control
> tends to be a more mature business, form a process stand point, and thus
> projects are delivered closer to projected timelines, closer to defined
> requirements, and most often with less feature creep. In this environment
> change comes only after some sort of analysis.
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You make some excellent points, David. I have to disagree a bit on the quoted
part above.
What you describe is two different development environments, neither of which
is dictated by the version control tool. CVS or VSS can be used in either
the "out of control" or the "system centered" environments.
I would assert that if development is out of control, the process needs
changing, not the versioning tool. For example:
Suppose it is found that merge conflicts happen a lot and multiple programmers
are frequently working on the same code file or even function. I would say
the process of who works on what code and the architecture of the code needs
to be changed. This has little to do with file locking or merge capabilities
of the tool. The development is not structured well.
Other problems like feature creep and "just getting the code out" are
certainly neither controlled nor accellerated by the version control tool.
I guess I am just saying that one should not expect that picking a different
or "the right" version tool will not, of themselves, solve development
process problems.
Alan
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