Technologies To Improve Group-Written Code? 74
iamdjsamba asks: "I've been working at my company as a programmer for about 4 months now, and it's apparent that the working methods could do with a refresh. Practices that we need to start changing are things like: non source-controlled changes that get uploaded to our website when they aren't ready; poor code commenting; and very little in the way of code reuse (if I write a class that could be useful to others, I have no easy way of telling everyone about it). I'm currently looking into ways to change this, and was wondering if anyone on Slashdot had experience of what's good and what's not?"
Wow. Quit now (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd recommend leaving for a company that's going to be around for more than a year.
Easiest Solution... (Score:3, Insightful)
Bob
Re: XP (Score:3, Insightful)
No, Extreme Programming can't help anything except to drive decent/good programmers crazy, support lazy/untalented programmers, and cut everyone's productivity in half (or worse).
From experience with both, I highly recommend Scrum over XP any day of the week. I still hate Scrum (if I wanted to spend all of my time in meetings, I'd have become an accountant intsead of a programmer), but it's far better than XP.
Create simple rules (Score:5, Insightful)
Create and enforce simple rules:
And you can always switch to Ruby on Rails. It is a good example of framework that helps doing things the right way and gets in the way when you want to do something wrong.
How can yo do group dev. without source control? (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds like you've got a group of undisciplined cowboys. Good like imposing structure on them.
Source control, and comments are absolutely required. The only reason not to do them is due to personalities, and if you have that problem, you don't have good devs.
Where is the team lead / project manager in all this? Start there. This is a leadership problem that is causing business problems (bad releases, poor quality control, poor communication, no reuse, no reproducibility, no records).
Look into sucking down some things from XP [extremeprogramming.org]. Daily stand-up meetings, unit testing, and continuous integration would be a good start. They sound bad to cowboys, but they solve these exact problems.
You have a "people" problem, not a technology one. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would not go with anything like XP or any other far-reaching methodology. No better way to make your programmers hate you and their jobs is to force them to do things completely different. Instead, once you got the basics right, get a few guys interested in XP (or whatever), ask them to do a pilot, and get them to share their experiences. Once you've shown that it works and you have a few others championing the methodology, convincing the rest will be a lot easier.
Re:Create simple rules (Score:2, Insightful)
In my experience people will often go out of their way to do things the wrong way. Not saying having a platform that encourages/discourages certain practices is a bad thing but without a strong leadership setting and enforcing standards I believe the impact would be minimal.
Lightweight Management (Score:5, Insightful)
Two of the issues that you mention are poor code reuse and a lack of code comments. These sound like human problems. Don't try to solve them with technology.
Your company may benefit from a different project management style. As many people have mentioned, you may be interested in Agile [wikipedia.org] (specifically Scrum [wikipedia.org] and XP [wikipedia.org]). Lightweight management, lightweight processes, and lightweight tools can breathe new life into a company.
Good luck!
Re:Wow. Quit now (Score:1, Insightful)
He may not have the option to just up and leave.
The best thing you can do is get a source control system in place now. I'm assuming you aren't very senior at 4 months, so find a senior technical person to buy into it and then take it to your manager or team lead. Once people have to "sign off" on changes it is easier to establish a build process and testing and all of the rest of what you need.
Since we don't know how large your team is, how many projects are involved, how large the codebase is, blah blah blah I can't really suggest anything more specific, but once you have a source control system that is actually used (and is enforced and bought into) then you can start fixing the rest of the problems you have with something appropriate for your size.
If you can't get a source control system in place then you should move on as fast as you can find a new job, as the situation will never get any better.
Re:Code needs comments (Score:4, Insightful)
And for what it is worth, McConnell references a study done by Lind and Vairavan that shows code with large numbers of comments also tended to have the most defects and tended to consume the most development effort.
I stand by my advise to re-write code that is clunky and awkward and requires a 100 page essay to describe it.
Re: XP (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, all those terrible practices such as testing, refactoring, incremental design, customer involvement, coding standards, and ubiquitous language shared with the customer's business domain really get in the way of coding sometime.
Re:Wow. Run away now (Score:3, Insightful)