Jun
15
15
Releasing software
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Since our first day last week, we’ve performed a dress rehearsal software development cycle. We generated and “released” a small application to help Audrey with market research, and in doing that, Noah and I got some practice in our own process.
- This was my first experience actively developing the same code base with another person, and I am now a convert to the church of source code management (SCM). I don’t yet have strong opinions about things like Subversion versus CVS (or the cults of darcs and git) but having a system at all (it happens we’re using Subversion) was downright revelatory. What’s more, the combination of an online SCM repository and IM meant Noah and I could work at home almost as effectively as in the same place. (Where “the same place” is usually my apartment, but never mind.)
- Although we’ve been using Basecamp for large-scale project management, as we got close to “done”� yesterday I set up a Trac project on the development server. All three of us spent a few hours in a three-way Skype chat, clicking around in the application, trying to break it however we could. Whenever we found an inelegant error message, unexpected behavior, or just something that didn’t feel the way we thought it should, we opened up a ticket in Trac. After a while, Noah and I were swatting bugs and closing tickets almost as fast as we opened them, though with three people opening tickets and only two closing them we were bound to get behind. By the end of the evening, we were about four tickets from “good enough.”
- I’m growing quite fond of the fourth member of our team. It’s a Mac Mini hiding unobtrusively behind a framed photo in my living room. This spring I installed all the software we’d need to use it as a development server, then unplugged the keyboard, monitor and mouse and let it run headless. Yesterday it was the nerve center of the finishing rush, supporting both the code repository (I count 27 commits over a four-hour span) and Trac (I’m not going to guess at our peak ticket rate) as well as the test copy of the application itself. It still has some minor issues, but right now it’s our only tangible asset, and yesterday it was well worth the $600 or so we paid for it.
We’ll take a day to clean up some loose ends and maybe close a few more tickets on this project, then roll into “real”� coding later in the week.
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