As a team should we develop locally and merge into the dev server, or develop on the dev server?

Question

Hey, Recently I was tasked with writing up formal procedures for a team based development enviroment. We have several projects with multiple modules each. Right now there are only two programmers, however there are plans to expand to 4-6 programmers. Each programmer will be working on the same project and possibly pages which may cause over writing or error issues.

So far the ideal solution I have thought up is:

1. Local development (WAMP/VM or some virtual server instance on their own machine). Once a developer has finished their developments, they check it into the CVS Repository and merge it wih other fixes etc.
2. The CVS version is then deployed to the primary dev server for testing by the devs.
3. The MySQL DAtabases are kept on the primary dev server and users may remotely connect to it. Any Schema / Data alterations are run through a DB Admin who will notify all devs of any DB Changes (Which should be rare).

Does anyone see an issue with this or have a better solution?

Answer 1

The idea of testing locally, merging changes and then deploying sounds good. The alternative (everyone developing on one server) sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

You might want to try upgrading from CVS though. Subversion is similar to CVS but more modern. If you want to completely change your way of thinking, you could trying something like Git.

Answer 2

Looks good. Just wanted to highlight this one very important point:

Make sure you have nightly builds in to the dev server. This will help catch problems at very early stages

By the way, while we are at it and in case you arent aware, Joel has a very good 12 point system for Quality of a Software Team

Excerpt

1 Do you use source control?
2 Can you make a build in one step?
3 Do you make daily builds?
4 Do you have a bug database?
5 Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
6 Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
7 Do you have a spec?
8 Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
9 Do you use the best tools money can buy?
10 Do you have testers?
11 Do new candidates write code during their interview?
12 Do you do hallway usability testing?

Answer 3

The model you describe is the one I've seen and used most often. I think each developer having their own local copy is more efficient and less risky. If all the code only exists on the dev server, an outage of the dev server stops all development. You also get less network traffic with a distributed model.

Answer 4

I think you should use a local version of your database not a live version. This will make testing easier and the developers wont have to worry that another developer edits data.