Claude, I recently went through exactly what you are dealing with now. Our development environment began with all developers working against the exact same code base, where developers would overwrite each others changes as well as break code during the development process that would affect other people. Don't even get me started on the problems we ran into when deploying to production servers.
Our first step into source control was to use Microsoft VSS which used the lock model. This worked ok for a short time but once our development team grew, having people constantly forced to wait for files to be unlocked became unbearable and began to kill our productivity. We recently (about 8 months ago) converted to SVN where each developer has a local copy of the code, makes their changes and then commits those changes to the main code. With a team of 20 developers constantly working with the same files, conflicts happen VERY rarely, and when they do it is 99% of the time a miscommunication as to what should be changed in that part of the code. Most of the time when code is committed, SVN merges in changes from other developers transparently. This idea at first sounds scary, but in practice it has been a TREMENDOUS advantage in terms of productivity, communication, and stability of our code. The ability to look back in time at our code has been invaluable in countless ways. If a bug was introduced, we can simply merge that change out of the code while we fix it. It truly is an unbelievable tool. The only downside that we've experienced is that the computers we use to work on have to be a little more "beefy" to be able to run local copies of our applications (CF, SQL, TSVN, Eclipse, etc.). > IMO the merging solution implies more overhead and clumsiness than no > solution at all. Hopefully I have communicated how this is truly not the case in a real world scenario (or at least in ours). If you have the chance, save yourself the growing pains of moving to a lock model, then outgrowing it and moving to SVN. If you are going to have your development team learn a new methodology for how they deal with source, have them learn how to effectively use SVN. In the end, we went from a development team of 5 using no source control to MS VSS, to over 20 developers using SVN. I can attest to the struggles of converting to source control, as well as not moving to SVN first. I hope that my experiences will help you in your efforts. HTH, Rich Kroll ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Create robust enterprise, web RIAs. Upgrade & integrate Adobe Coldfusion MX7 with Flex 2 http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;56760587;14748456;a?http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/flex2/?sdid=LVNU Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:265196 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.4
