Identifying the Challenges of Team Development

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Professional software development is often performed by more than one programmer. As more and more developers become involved in a project, managing the work performed by all the developers becomes exponentially more difficult. A team-developed project can quickly become a multiheaded beast , ready to strike at any time. Some of the challenges inherent with team development are

• Making sure that multiple developers aren't modifying the same code and objects at the same time
• Preventing developers from overwriting the work of others
• Tracking versions of the software
• Centralizing project files

When two developers modify the same code at the same time, someone's going to lose. Generally, it's the first programmer to finish the modifications who loses the work ”the second developer overwrites the first programmer's changes. It can be quite a task to make sure that developers don't "stomp" on each other as a project progresses. Also, it's imperative that multiple programmers don't waste time working on the same problem.

Version tracking can also be a challenge in a team environment. With so many changes to so many source files taking place, it's difficult to get a snapshot of the project in any particular state. As developers make changes to different files, or even to the same files, tracking the changes over time becomes increasingly complicated.

Visual Basic projects often consist of dozens of different files, and trying to find the optimum way to manage these files can be frustrating. Allowing only one developer to work on the project at a time is obviously not a solution. Should you let each developer modify a full version of the source project on his or her local computer and email you a batch of changes? Not really; project files need to be better organized than that and easily accessible. The challenges multiply with every developer added to the team. Reducing the complexity of the situation (as well as reducing the possibility of costly errors) is critical, and Visual SourceSafe will definitely help you in this regard.