Loosely Coupled

I'm the type of person who constantly looks for ways to improve. No matter how well things go, I'm always striving to "plus" an experience - smooth out the rougher edges to make the next time even better. Sometimes the need to do this drives me a little nuts. It drives my wife really nuts! When things don't go well, this task can be a little overwhelming (and depressing). There are so many areas for improvement, it's hard to know where to begin. I've spent the last year or so, reexamining my software development experience - looking for trends in the tools and ideas that helped the teams I was on to be highly productive (and conversely where the lack of some practices led to a lack of productivity and frustration). Combined with many of the things I've read by Spolsky , Fowler , and the Poppendiecks . I've created a list of criteria I'd consider essential in an ideal software development environment. Talk to the target user...

Change Control & Release Management are two of the most fundamental elements in software engineering. You write code. You release code to the world. All the while, track changes to the code in case something goes horribly wrong and you need to revert to a previous version. It's pretty simple. Modern change control systems like CVS provide additional functionality. When checking in changes, you can include comments to describe the changes. Tagging the repository ties various versions of source files together (i.e. for a release). Branching involves splitting the repository so parallel development can take place (i.e. to support bug fixes to a release while the next version of development continues on the trunk). Changes on the branch can be merged into the trunk, eliminating the need to apply fixes twice. These features are fairly standard in most of the change systems software development teams use today. The point of this post is to ask why some organizations are rel...