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Taming the Code

Learn the essentials on how to tame the code in your development team. Reassess your development environment, increase productivity and improve the accountability of your team. Geoff lays bare the painful realities of managing programmers and uncovers the secrets behind what it takes to regain control.

Prerequisites: Aimed at the team leader or manager, this talk will benefit everyone from large teams to one-man shops. No technical expertise required.

Session Detail

We're asking the big questions:

Is your teams development environment up to par?
Do you even have defined code management processes?
Can they be improved?

You bet they can. Learn why best practice development environments, version control and code progression are critical to the success of every team.

CVS Server Options

The server component sorts and organises the versioned files. You really don't need to understand what its up to beyond applying some security for users to authenticate and read/write piveleges.

CVS
http://www.cvshome.org/
This is the original flavour and is available for pretty much every distribution. We currently use this but are thinking about switching to CVSNT.

CVSNT
http://www.cvsnt.org/
This was originally written for NT/Windows platform but now is a fully-fledged cross platform product in its own right ie. there is a UNIX version of CVSNT. CVSNT offers some advantages over the original CVS server: http://www.cvsnt.org/wiki/CvsntAdvantages

CVS Clients for Windows

The client basically hooks up to the server repository and lets you interact with what is there. For the average developer, this is the only thing they need to work with -- ie. no need to understand the server itself.

TortoiseCVS (Enjoyable Version Control)
http://www.tortoisecvs.org/
http://blog.daemon.com.au/archives/000077.html
Great tool (my favourite) that integrates directly with Windows explorer interface.
Daily Use Guide: http://noc.postnuke.com/docman/view.php/6/41/TortoiseCVS.htm

WinCVS
http://www.wincvs.org/
WinCVS gives you some great filtering options not available in Tortoise CVS -- so I find myself using this tool in some situations, especially when I'm cleaning up.
Daily Use Guide: http://ikon.as/wincvs-howto/ (great primer regardless of your preferred client)

WinMerge
http://winmerge.sourceforge.net/
WinMerge is an Open Source visual text file differencing and merging tool for Win32 platforms. Features include: diff / merge, directory comparison, directory recursion, and more. Use this in combination with your favourite CVS client.

Management & Reporting Tools

CVSMonitor - keeping an eye on the karma
http://blog.daemon.com.au/archives/000151.html

CodeHistorian
And other products from the same folk who built this product -- great little tool.
http://www.codehistorian.com/codehistorian-overview.php

Books

Essential CVS
http://blog.daemon.com.au/archives/000182.html

Speakers

Geoff Bowers (Daemon, Australia)

Geoff's the CEO and application architect for Daemon Internet Consultants. As an Adobe Master Instructor, father of FarCry, and keeper of the Goog, Geoff keeps his hand in doing a bit of ColdFusion here and there. More...