Code Leader: Using People, Tools, and Processes to Build Successful Software

Chapter 13. Calculator Project: A Case Study

Bob the developer comes to work in the morning, catches up on his email, and then sets to work on his project. Bob is working on the Calculator project, which has just recently started up. The Calculator team has just begun their first development iteration, and Bob is anxious to start writing code and adding value to the project.

The first thing that Bob does is decide which task to work on. He goes to his project-management system and picks the highest-priority task that is currently unassigned.

For the sake of this narrative, Bob's team is using SCRUM to manage tasks and how they are assigned, but any development methodology would fit in here. The important point is that Bob chooses a task that has some form of task number associated with it.

Bob's task for the day is Task 5: Add subtraction to the calculator. Bob has a pretty clear idea of what that task entails and how it fits in with the rest of the project, so he doesn't think that he needs to validate anything with the customer.

Bob knows that because his project is following the Model-View-Presenter model, he will have to make changes to a number of different files in several projects to complete his task. To make sure that all of the changes he makes can be correlated to the task, Bob creates a new task branch in his source control system (see Figure 13-1), after checking the build server to make sure that the current build has succeeded. Bob wouldn't want to create a task ...