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Same Dev Tools/Language/Framework For Everyone?

Posted by kdawson on from the one-size-fits-none dept.

AC writes "Upper management of the company I work at recently declared that all new development should be done with a single combination of development tools, language, and framework. The main rationale is that people can be relocated from one group / project to another faster, because they don't need to learn a new environment when they switch. Of course the chosen language / framework used by everybody does not need to be the best tool for the job, but it should be good enough to allow every project to get done. What does Slashdot think about this? Is it OK to use the same development tools and language for every project, instead of choosing what fits best? Will the time saved be sufficient to offset the time lost to the 'not the best tool for the job' environment developers will be forced to use?"

5 of 519 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Standardize the RIGHT tools by Fred+Foobar · · Score: 5, Informative

    That combination is better than just free as in beer... it's also free as in free speech! Subversion, Ant, and CruiseControl are all Free Software.

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    It was a really good paper.
  2. Re:Choose them all under one. by robthebloke · · Score: 3, Informative

    Perforce doesn't differ too much from SVN, but it just works better.

    So yeah, perforce doesn't give you much over SVN with a small/medium dev team, but you do start noticing some short-comings, and little quirks with SVN when you start working on larger projects. e.g. Branching and (especially) merging. I'd definately go with perforce for a large scale project - if only for the relatively pain free merging....

  3. Re:Choose them all under one. by PLBogen · · Score: 3, Informative

    They may be using a 3rd party commercial Eclipse package like MyEclipse.

  4. Re:Choose them all under one. by S.O.B. · · Score: 3, Informative

    Even a free tool has a TCO. We use Eclipse but we have a team who support it (as well as numerous other tools) in our environment. They do things like setup/configuration, installation, investigating new plugins, developer support, etc. I don't think it amounts to a significant amount per developer but it is a non-zero cost.

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    Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
  5. Re:Choose them all under one. by Clith · · Score: 4, Informative

    [..] I suspect the advantages are at the administration level (reorganizing, branching, merging, etc).

    Having gone from an svn shop to a Perforce shop, I can definitely say that branching/merging is much easier in svn than in Perforce. Also, the whole "client" concept is a bad alternative to file system state files (i.e. .svn or CVS directories).

    I'm not saying that using the filesystem is the best alternative possible, but it's the least worst right now.

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    [ReidNews]