DSCM – A Move Back to Big Bang Integration

Used sensibly the move away from centralised to distributed source control management offers more benefits than it does drawbacks. Used unwisely it could take us back to the days of Big Bang Integration

Branching Privately

Irrespective of the number of meetings attended or PowerPoint slides produced, developers communicate in one language, and one language only – the language of code. In many organisations trunk, or centrally hosted branches, give visibility of the work going on. This keeps everyone in the loop as to what is being developed, how its being done, and by whom.

Moving away from this work flow, towards teams working in local branches away from prying eyes, cuts this information flow. The development effort in these branches, now lacking the exposure to more than the team working on it, could miss out on vital feedback from other team members. Team member, that had the work been done centrally, allowing them to see what was happening, could have given feedback. This could have saved the team weeks or months of effort had they known that code already existed over here, or this team requires that module to do that as well, so don’t duplicate effort. These issues won’t be discovered until the big bang, the merge back into the mainline.

Large Changesets

Branches, by there very nature result in larger changesets being pushed back into the mainline. This can also be true when working on the main branch, but on a local repository. There can also be a temptation to complete a full feature before pushing the changes to the mainline. Developers will still be commiting their code in small changesets, but without giving it that push upstream to the mainline many benefits are lost.

Committing a feature little by little has many benefits. I’ve already mentioned peer review when talking about branching. In addition to this it allows detection of regressions to be detected as early as possible, making them easier to locate. Putting code into the mainline in feature size chunks certainly result in making it easier to track which changeset caused a regression, as there will be less of them. But finding which part of that feature sized changeset caused the regression will not be so easy.

Enjoy responsibly

Distributed soruce control management systems give us great power, but remember with great power comes great responsilbity.

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