Practical Development Environments

Chapter 2. Project Basics

This chapter briefly describes the different parts of a project and then introduces the main activities invoved in software development and the corresponding tools that make up a development environment. The activities are software configuration management (SCM), building software, testing software, tracking bugs, writing documentation, releasing products, and maintenance. This chapter ends with some personal recommendations of tools for three different types of development environments.

Whether you are starting a project from scratch or looking to improve an existing development environment, my opinion is that you should consider the different parts of the environment in the same order used in this chapter and in this book. That is, SCM is the most important part of an environment; next in importance are the build tools, then testing and bug tracking, and so on. This is because your choice of SCM tool is likely to have the largest impact on your environment. This is not to say that any of the parts are unimportant, just that improving how your SCM tool and build tool are used will probably improve your environment more than improving the bug tracking tool or release process. Similarly, if you are creating a new project, an SCM tool should be chosen before a bug tracking tool.

The Parts of a Project

Figure 2-1 shows the different parts of a single project. This project has source files that become products, and those products have customers who use the products. ...