In an August 2005 blog-entry on SCM Design smells, I tried to translate the design smells that Robert Martin. wrote up in his book on Agile principles, Patterns and Practices. In the first of the two articles above, I think I was much more successful at translating them into the version-control domain. Here is what I came up with ...
Symptoms of Poor Version Control
- Rigidity/Inertia:
- The software is difficult to integrate and deploy/upgrade because every update impacts, or is impacted by, dependencies upon other parts of the development, integration, or deployment environment
- Fragility/Inconsistency:
- Builds are easily “broken” because integrating new changes impacts other fixes/features/enhancements that are seemingly unrelated to the change that was just made, or changes keep disappearing/reappearing or are difficult to identify/reproduce
- Immobility/Inactivity:
- New fixes/features/enhancements take too long to develop because configurations and their updates take a long time to integrate/propagate or build & test.
- Viscosity/Friction:
- The “friction” of software process against the development flow of client-valued changes is too high because the process has an inappropriate degree of ceremony or control
- Needless Complexity/Tedium:
- Procedures and tasks are overly onerous and/or error-prone because of too many procedural roles/steps/artifacts, too fine-grained “micro” tracking/status-accounting, overly strict enforcement or rigid and inflexible workflow
- Needless Repetition/Redundancy:
- The version-control process exhibits excessive branching/merging, workspaces or baselining in order to copy the contents of files, changes and versions to maintain multiple views of the codebase.
- Opacity/Incomprehensibility:
- It is difficult to understand and disentangle the branching/merging and baselining schemes into a simple and transparent flow of changes for multiple tasks and features developed from multiple collaborating teams working on multiple projects from multiple locations for multiple customers
In my next entry I'll start describing the actual principles and their translations.
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