How to manage SC Development?

[cace1]

How do you manage SC development across numerous

developers yet keep it organized? HELP! I am looking for feedback/ideas/experiences as to how others in the field perform the difficult task of library management and/or concurrent development needs within SC. I (and likely others) would really appreciate it if anyone out there has developed a somewhat structured approach to this need and/or has found a tool that assist. Regards,

Carl

[tommy]

So far the best way we have found in the company where I work is through communication and documentation of all changes.



We closely coordinate all changes and group several changes into a release. This tends to result in some time wasted if certain changes take less time to implement than scheduled. Then we have the option to start on a new change and incorporate that into the release or the developer can do something else. On the other hand if we do include more changes to keep developers busy we risk delaying other ongoing changes.



To keep track of the changes we use the unload script facility. As we change elements we add the element to the unload script. We then also use this script to get a backup the target system. This way we have a good way to back out of changes if they fail. Only drawback is that all changes is backed out.



As mentioned in a mail on the servicecenter newsgroup V5 of SC brings more attention to this subject with revision tracking. But that is in my opinion still way out in the future. And if the speed of new releases for SC5 have to keep up with SC4 we will see at least 3 releases before we will even be "allowed" to upgrade to V5.



In the meantime it would be nice if somebody already has developed better procedures and methods to manage development efficiently.



Because our method really only works well when the developers is sitting next to each other, if not it is too easy to forget to coordinate. We also have that problem because we also develop on a customer SC, and the customer is also now starting to develop at the same time, that will be fun.....