Re: Advice for a efficient and productive software development environment?

["Alex Howells" <alex.howells () 0wn3d us>]

Hi Razi

> Im working in a small software company and i've been thinking of
> redesigning the development environment, in terms of
> hardware/software.
> And was hoping that some of you might have some pointers that lead to
> a productive/efficient environment.
>
> I'ts rather unogranized at the time, so i thought of this:
> All software developers should have the same hardware in the development boxes.
> Setup a ghost server for the devteam, so that people can fetch images
> of different OSs/software environment depending on which OS they need
> to work in, in a specific project.
>
> I Recently encountered a situation when one member of the team had to
> switch OS, and it took a total of 3 days to set it up (including
> development environment, software and such),
> not so productive. (vmware is not an option).
>
> Setup a hudson server, development boxes acting as slaves for
> continious integration.

Both 'Joel on Software' (Joel Spolsky) and 'Rands in Repose' have
excellent suggestions on how to create an optimal development
environment, and the former has several books out discussing how they
do things at Fog Creek.  Not just the environment, but also how to
manage your software developers so they remain happy and productive
and write 'rock star' code.

I'd suggest giving both of them a look.

Alex