Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

22.1. Preparing the Solution

A well-structured and organized solution is the key to effective development and application maintenance. The solution is the first thing that you see. A poorly organized and structured solution is not only annoying, but it also affects your ability to find things. It may get sorted out eventually, but a little preparation goes a long way. Before a long car journey, you check the oil, water, and tire pressure. These simple checks go a long way toward ensuring a trouble-free journey. In this section, you perform a similar set of readiness activities for the solution.

22.1.1. Defining the Folders and Projects

The solution is nothing more than a simple hierarchical folder structure. Chapter 3, "Preparing for 'Production'," touched on how the folders could be organized to distinguish different configurations and environments. The overall solution structure is intended to distinguish the different projects and components. The solution should be structured in two important ways:

• To differentiate what is intended for production vs. testing

• To provide a meaningful "at-a-glance" overview of the solution structure, projects, and components

Although defining the solution is a personal choice, keeping the preceding in mind will help to ensure that development and test matter doesn't get mixed up (and deployed) with production elements. The second point will naturally help promote the deployment concept throughout the project. Chapter 14 looked at the high-level ...