Stop Breaking the Build

Cap'n Grumpy writes "You know the score - you've just finished some coding, do a final cvs update before commiting, and all of a sudden all hell breaks loose. Your code now refuses to compile, or xunit starts flashing up red - test failures! One of the other members of your team has checked in something which breaks the build, and they just went out for lunch ... Argh! Did you know there is a solution to this problem? It is a system which makes it impossible for people to check in code which does not compile or test successfully. It allows coders to review others coding efforts code before it goes into the baseline, rather than after. It organises your checkins into logical change sets. It enforces continuous integration. It is linux based, and GPL'd. It's called Aegis."

Comments

Re:Part of the problem is CVS

[etcshadow]

"for closed source development you should rarely need to edit the same file unless your team is poorly organized or system poorly designed"

Oh, come on. That's such a load. I'll agree that CVS is a big part of the problem, but not because you shouldn't let more than one developer edit the same file at the same time. Rather, simply because CVS sucks.

I hate to admit it, because I love the open source movement, and I know what an important role CVS plays in it, but CVS relly does bite compared to some of the commercial alternatives. I mean, no trackable atomic changes? No means for integration with job tracking? A shitty-beyond-belief branch methodology? Poor tracking of and integration of changes across branches? Crappy permissioning structure?

Where I work we use Perforce, which I absolutely adore. Does not have any of the issues I listed above, works in unix and windows, is command line easy and has a pretty damn good GUI (compare to WinCVS, ack!), is wonderfully scriptable, and is really not that expensive (although I can definitely understand the desire to spend $0).

Anyway, you can't really expect to have a large group of developers both iterating and maintaining a fairly large codebase without ever needing to edit overlapping files... not unless you keep each function/subroutine/method in its own file. Even then, I imagine you'd still run into occasional change resolution issues. The better way to deal with the problem is not to close your eyes and put your hands over your ears; it's to outfit yourself with decent tools capable of dealing with real life. I know that with perforce, and I would imagine with most other half-decent source management systems, simultaneous edits are really not that big of a deal. Unless you've actually edited the same lines in the same file, the user doesn't typicaly have to do a damn thing. And regardless, it is still the fault of the first user to check in a busted file. Again, atomic changes mean that if it compiled for you, and you check it in, then compiles for everyone else.

Cookies

[IanBevan]

Well, as odd as this might sound, when anybody checks anything to our source control that breaks the build, they have to go out and buy the entire development team a coffee and/or chocolate cookies. This worked like a charm. It not only raises awareness and makes people more careful, it has actually increased moral in the team as we look forward to the weekly build to see who has cocked it up :-)

Re:Part of the problem is CVS

[Twylite]

but for closed source development you should rarely need to edit the same file unless your team is poorly organized or system poorly designed

...or if you happen to have a high level of code reuse; or if you have doing firmware, software and driver development in parallel; or if you have a small but busy team; or if you have a large but busy team; or ... or ... or.

This is a ridiculous statement. There are any number of reasons that multiple developers will work on a single file at once, especially in a well structure organisation or development. Development, code inspection, fixes in response to testing and maintenance fixes (bringing a patch from a release into current) can ALL happen simultaneously in a development tree, and can ALL happen simultaneously in one file. They just shouldn't often happen simultaneously in one method/function.