Hanselman: First Rule of Software Development
Coincidentally soon after my post on Keeping It Green, Scott Hanselman posts his colleague’s First Rule of Software Development:
Never commit code just before you leave for the day.
This is identical the third item on my list for keeping the build healthy. Interestingly the developer had obeyed the first item on the list, i.e. testing locally before checkin:
The CCNET (Continuous Integration) build subsequently broke – despite the fact that he ran a local build first – and team members who were still in the office had difficulty progressing with their work for several hours.
But I’m obliged to repeat that an even better way to meet the first item is with a personal build. If the developer had been using Pulse, then they could have submitted a personal build to Pulse and found out that the build would break before they checked the code in, and all in the same or less time than it takes to run the tests locally. A small investment in better tools could have avoided the costly loss of team productivity ;).
