Team development environment

Question

Hello Stackoverflow

I have been given the task to team mange a total refactoring of a webpage, build in PHP. I'm only the student worker :( so my experience in a team development environment is limited.

Well my question here is how do we best manage the development of the website? At the moment do we use a SVN for version control, where each dev have a branch. I am having a dream about mapping [brach name].devserver.com to the given branch of the SVN. But I’m not sure this is the best way to do it? Would setting up at local development server up on each dev pc be better? Also if we where to use our Development server for our testing, is mapping to SVN branch be best? Or would a normal ftp be easier?

Any input will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I believe it is pretty good to have a local environment where you can work free of the thought to destroy anything and have clear environment types.

Also, I think it is a good idea to have different branches for development, testing and production. By having this, you have all your finished and tested code in the production environment and finished code but untested in the testing environment. This makes it easy to run tests, show the product and also to develop.

If you're going to work as a manager, ask your team about the technical stuff. They probably have some good ideas to, and it's always good to find out what they like.

Answer 2

This is why distributed version control is gaining more ground.

For more information take a look at bazaar: http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/latest/en/user-guide/bazaar_workflows.html

And Joel's Hg Init tutorial: http://hginit.com/

They'll give you a little better understanding about DVCS, and why it's better than using Subversion (IMHO... and a few other thousand programmers). And if you're using DVCS, you can test on the "main" server, you can each install LAMP/WAMP servers and test on your own box, or any variation you can think of. The important thing is to figure out what works best for your team, and do that.