Comment Branches Are a Must (and XP/Agile learnings) (Score 1) 79
Braches work and branching cannot be avoided if you have real life project with installed base of old releases that have to be supported.
But you must be careful with the branches and understand how branching and merging work. Good idea is to write and to rigorously follow very hands down branching guidelines for your project with all the updates and -d's and -P's in place so that even the more experienced have no excuse for not doing it right ('oops, I forgot to cvs -xyz foo -bar').
One thing I found out when doing XP (Agile nowadays?) style development was that it is good to use very short lifespan on most branches i.e. use temporary branches for each implementation unit and merge the changes to the development branch when the unit is finished.
Long lived branches should be used when updating old and developing new releases, one per release.
The temporary braches should be really temporary with lifespans as short as 30 min and never leave them hang around to the next day.
Of cource the standard XP practice of running unit tests each time you build running "make" or "ant" and passing them all before you "commit" the merge is also quite recommendable.
It is also a good idea to require all working in the same release branch to update each time a merge (or "integration" in XP) is done.
But you must be careful with the branches and understand how branching and merging work. Good idea is to write and to rigorously follow very hands down branching guidelines for your project with all the updates and -d's and -P's in place so that even the more experienced have no excuse for not doing it right ('oops, I forgot to cvs -xyz foo -bar').
One thing I found out when doing XP (Agile nowadays?) style development was that it is good to use very short lifespan on most branches i.e. use temporary branches for each implementation unit and merge the changes to the development branch when the unit is finished.
Long lived branches should be used when updating old and developing new releases, one per release.
The temporary braches should be really temporary with lifespans as short as 30 min and never leave them hang around to the next day.
Of cource the standard XP practice of running unit tests each time you build running "make" or "ant" and passing them all before you "commit" the merge is also quite recommendable.
It is also a good idea to require all working in the same release branch to update each time a merge (or "integration" in XP) is done.
