Agile practitioners already know that technical debt is that accumulation of unfinished work can cause projects to be late late late. Building up a lot of technical debt is a problem because the debt needs to be payed before you can ship. One way that debt can be accumulated is by profligate use of branches. Avoid that at all costs! Continue reading
Most of what a developer needs to know about SVN is covered in SVN Essentials. However, if you are a project lead, and responsible for a project with multiple releases, you might need to also knows these details about branching and tagging. Continue reading
This is really a management issue, not a coding issue. In short: when a bug is fixed on a branch, it should be at the same time (or immediately after) fixed in the trunk. The logic should be obvious, but I found out recently that some development teams are NOT following this guideline.This post is an attempt to lay out the logic of why a software development team must follow this. Continue reading
We try to avoid having multiple versions of a product under maintenance at a time, but every product shipped to real customers has to offer support of the version that the customer has. This post offer guidance around handling of bug fixes in a multi-branch development environment. Continue reading
Agile Software Craftsmanship 