We are going to use TFS 2010 for a new project and I'm looking for a best practice and knowledge/experience about using the policy check in option when developing as a team.
I've found information about all this but not really that much information about best practices and what dev teams opinions and experiences about policies, which they used and perhaps should have used.
Which policies did you use?
What was your experience?
What would you recommend?
For instance have you used Microsoft Minimum Recommended Rules and did you use them all?
Information and your experience is appreciated.
The most essential check-in policies are:
Comment Policy - require comments for all check ins.
Work Item association - this should be mandatory as without it you cannot group change sets to a particular stream of work. You need to be able to do this for merging and rolling back changes wholesale.
Gated Check In - While not a policy as such (you need to create a gated build) it prevents developers from checking in code that breaks the build. If you created linked builds across your code base you can ensure your solutions are never broken by check in again. I've done it and it works.
There are many others (we use a Gemini item association policy) and you can write your own as we have. It's not that hard and you can tailor them to fit.
This is more of a discussion question, which is not the type of question StackOverflow usually wants, but I'll bite.
The policies that for me make sense are:
Builds policy
This policy prevents a build queue of failed builds after someone breaks the build. You will actually be warned that the build is currently broken, so that someone can fix the build before continuing.
Work Item Association
We need work item association to ensure we can trace checkins to work being done an through that to testcases.
Work item Query
We want people to select their work from the current sprint/iteration. So it's handy to verify that the work people are checking in against is actually pre-approved work.
Custom Path Policy
We use this policy once in a while in Team projects that house more than one project and where we want to increase quality or security on one project, but are not interested in bothering the other project. Or to prevent certain checkins on the current release branch, but don't want such stringent policies on an old release that is still being maintained.
We verify a few things which you could do through checkin-policies by failing the CI build instead. This is done mostly to save time on the developers machines.
Code Analysis Policy.
Instead of using a checkin policy for this, we use a CI build which will fail if certain Code Analysis rules are broken. This allows us to let the developer builds skip Code Analysis on every build. People will learn pretty quickly how to prevent these rules from triggering anyways.
We're not using any other policy. The Require comment for change set policy is something we sometimes use, but most teams actually don't need a policy for this after some time. Having no comments on a checkin is frowned upon by most and this resolves itself.
We had a couple of projects where time tracking was done (for MSF CMMI) and we used a custom policy to ensure people updated their hours on every checkin.
We're not using any policy to enforce Code Coverage or Number of warnings. These can be added to the build if needed through build process customization.
We use Gated Checkins on branches that require additional verification. Such as release branches and branches that are followed by automatic deployment.
We often allow developers to by-pass any checkin policy without penalty. Same goes for gated Checkins. It is up to the developer to use these rights wisely. Breaking a deployment is something you cannot do too often before being noticed by the team ;).
There are a few interesting custom policies out there as well, but I know only a handful of people who actually went as far as to use these.
Merge only policy
This policy allows you to specify a couple of branches that can only receive merges of already checked in work on another branch.
Forbidden Patterns Policy
I've sometimes used these to ensure no /bin/debug, .exe or .dll was checked into a //src/ folder in TFS.
There are a few more policies from 3rd parties, but I've never used those. These include:
The Checkin Policy Pack and that page lists a couple of extra policies that I've never had to use either.
One of the reasons for not using too many 3rd party policies is that all team members need to have the polcies installed on their machines. The Team Foundation Server Power Tools can help you out with the distribution, but those are not deployed and configured on all developers workstations by default.
Also available in blog form.
Try each of the check-in policies to see if they provide value to your team.
Some of our Team Projects require only a check in comment. Some require a comment and a work item. Some require a successful build. It all depends on what the team requires.
Don't try to follow someone else's best practice. Determine what works in your environment.
Related
We are using Microsoft Team foundation server for version control where multiple developers are working on a branch and check in and check out the code.
How can a developer A be notified via email or SMS that his code got overwritten during the checkin by developer B.
Developer A needs to know this ASAP because the code changes of developer A will not work when its deployed into QA.
We are tring to save time in a fast paced development environment and trying to avoid code overwrite issues.
The easiest way to allow continuous parallel development and prevent a checkin from one person breaking the code of others, is to use a CI server. TFS supports this through Team Build.
Though it's preferred to run team build on a dedicated build server, it can be installed side-by-side on your main TFS server and it's possible to install the Controller component centrally and use your developer's workstations as agents.
There are two types of build triggers that can help you out here:
Continuous Integration - this triggers a build of all code directly after every checkin. It will tell you quickly that something did not compile. If you are doing unit tests it can even run these and tell you that a test is failing.
Gated - this will force a developer to shelve his code and will only check in the code when the build of the latest version plus the changes in the shelveset succeed. This may seem even better, as the code in source control will never be in a broken state, but in reality I prefer the ci trigger. The main reason for that us that Gated builds can't happen in parallel (due to their nature) and can actually delay the notification that the code is broken.
You can easily configure email alerts through webaccess on specific build outcomes. You can also configure alerts on source changes, but there is no option to only warn people who have edited these specific files before.
You can also run the Build Notification tool from the task tray to show a notification in Windows.
Though this will not tell the person whose code has just been overwritten that it's no longer working, it will tell the person I rewriting that code that he should pay more attention when checking in ;).
Of course you can configure a team alert that notifies everyone when the build breaks (as that's generally called), and there are funny ways to show the build status through small apps like "siren of shame", which provides a build monitor service that can be connected to a USB alarm-light that turns on and provides noise whenever someone does something stupid.
If you need to avoid this problem during check-in & merge, then I would recommend disabling multiple check-out. This allows file to only be checked out one-at-a-time and can prevent confusion on team projects.
If you need to do farther down the line, you can create TFS Alerts when any code is checked in and sent out to a distribution list, but it would not notify when specific contributions from a specific developer is altered - only a list of altered files during the check-in.
Here's the requirement:
C# classes need to be shared among a group of 5 developers.
If one developer starts editing a class, it should be automatically locked for others
Others can edit that class, only when the current developer releases the class
I understand that Git is a distributed version control system, whereby complete local repositories are created. Merge functionality has to be used for creating a consolidated file.
I have also tried Svn, but even that uses a Merge tool.
I have a small team, and I don't want to use Merge Tools. Which is the best way to accomplish this?
SVN does support this kind of workflow with its locking feature.
Read the section on locking in the SVN Book v 1.7 - it goes into plenty of detail.
As far as Im aware git does not support a locking workflow.
Apparently Team Foundation Server also supports a locking workflow, but I'm not familiar with it.
I will add that i do not think this a good way to work unless you absolutely have to (eg binaries or hard to merge files like model xml). Regular team communication and defensive programming should mean that the vast majority of code merges will be handled automatically by your version control system.
Merging is just a part of collaborative development. Nobody really wants to use merge tools, but IMO having to do an occasional (sometimes messy) merge is a far better prospect that having to wait until someone else is finished with a file before I can make my change - changes which are very likely NOT to conflict with others changes anyway. Especially in a small team.
You should also not (as mentioned in comments above) need a resource dedicated to Merging. A merge is best done by two people.
The developer with the conflict, and
The developer who committed the last change (that has caused that conflict.)
If these two can't work it out pretty quickly, or you really do need a resource just for merging (which I have seen occur even in smallish teams of around 10 developers) you have problems.. such as;
The code is monolithic/highly coupled and needs refactoring
The developers are not committing atomic changes.
Using svn and a complex branching strategy (scary)
Developers are not talking to each other (Just a 10 min standup/day would help)
Good luck!
Apache Subversion 1.8 features major improvements that make merging and solving conflicts easier. New automatic merges are definitely worth testing!
As #mounds already mentioned, you can use pessimistic locking kind of workflow with Apache Subversion. See the SVNBook | Lock communication section. In such case Visual Studio with VisualSVN will prompt you to lock a file before you start modifying it.
Note that such approach should be used with those files that can't be merged. So~, Embrace Merge!
Users and administrators alike are encouraged to attach the
svn:needs-lock property to any file that cannot be contextually
merged. This is the primary technique for encouraging good locking
habits and preventing wasted effort.
Our team's project solution has several individual projects associated with it, one of which is designed to serve as an underlying framework for our application layer -- call it "FrameworkProject". Only in rare cases should the code for this project be edited, and in these cases I would like to be able to approve the changes to the code. Is there a TFS capability that would allow me to achieve this?
We're using VS2010 and TFS2010.
You have several options:
Implement a custom check in policy and work item type. TFS Code
Review Workflow
Look at Team Review
Implement a process that enforces that any changes must be shelve-set first allowing for a code review. Once the review has
taken place then based on permission the allowed member checks the
code into the Project.
Hope this helps.
Here are a few other options:
You can use check-in locks to prevent check-ins. You can do this by locking the top-level directory that you want to protect. Now, if someone tries to check-in, the check-in will fail and you will need to have an internal process where you review the change, temporarily unlock the folder and allow the check-in to proceed.
You could probably implement a gated check-in workflow that would send an email to you when a check-in was submitted to the given paths. From there you could have some approval process that would allow the gated check-in to complete.
You may create a "working" branch of your framework and revoke checkin rights from the main branch for everyone except the reviewers.
When someone needs to do a change, he has to change the working branch and a reviewer then has to merge the changes to the main branch in this step he will review all changes using his preferred diff tool on the mergeset before checkin in. He may revoke the merge and request fixes by simply undoing his working copy and optionally checking in review comments into the working branch.
Following SO thread shows Managing DLL references in multiple projects across different solutions. Additionally I want to know how to manage the version control for these dependency DLLs ?
Should the DLL (which is published to other external projects) be committed too, every time code change happens ?
Team Development with TFS Guide (Final Release)
This guide has proven to be invaluable to my team. They describe several scenarios and what the pros and cons are of each. For anyone managing a TFS environment this is a must read.
With regards to the DLL's from external projects. We will keep a copy of the source in TFS if we can get access to the source some times, use your best judgement. We keep a copy of the DLL in source control always. The DLL goes into a "SharedBinaries" folder next to source code so that they can be branched together.
It is critical that you be able to branch these DLL's along with source. It is also critical that they be in TFS so that you can do an automated build with little or no build machine configuration. My own personal goal while managing TFS is to be ready for a new developer to join the team and with a single get of source code be able to execute a successful build for local debugging.
EDIT: Different department builds DLL
Like all good IT answers I have to start with "it depends". If the other department is truly segregated from your department and you have little or no knowledge of what they are working or when they will be working on it. If they just occasionally tell you that they have done some things and you should now incorporate the changes then I would lean towards the DLL being committed to the repository every time that the department consuming it wants to change it.
If on the other hand we are really just talking about different teams in the same department where there is lots of cross talk and water cooler communication then I would expect that you could making something else work with just some project references.
It sounds to me like it is the former and not the latter situation that you find yourself in today. I would try to get the department that is creating the shared code to "release" the shared code like Microsoft releases the .NET Framework. Get them to just build the API and give you some DLL's and some documentation. Then the groups that are incorporating those DLL's into there products can check them in separately into a repository of there own control and isolate themselves from code churn while the department working on the these reused DLL's can work on the next version of them.
You should take this all with a grain of salt. This is just one guy rambling on about what might be a good idea. There are many more ways to solve these problems and they are all correct given different circumstances. If you are asking 5 people and you get 5 different responses I wouldn't be surprised.
Currently I am working on a project that uses TFS as source control. I am in the middle of implementing a piece of functionality, but am blocked by work that needs to be done by outside resources. Since the functionality is not fully complete, I can't check in the changes without breaking the build. So instead of waiting a couple days while the blocking work is finished, I want to work on some defects.
To do this work in isolation from my other changes, I am working the defects in a second workspace I just created.
After using a second workspace to isolate my changes, a coworker asked me why I didn't just shelve my changes. After doing some reading on shelving, it looks like this is preferred solution to situations like mine. My question is what situations, if any, would you create multiple workspaces and what situations should you use shelving? There are some posts about shelving, but I don't see very much on the subject of workspaces.
By the way, I got the idea for creating a second workspace here.
A new branch would probably be the best way to go. But, to answer your question, one of the key differences between shelving and just using a differnet workspace is that when you shelve, you push your code back to TFS, so it is backed up. Whatever is in your workspace is just what you have on your machine -- if you lose it, it's gone.
We use branching a lot in my shop, and as a result, I haven't seen many uses for shelving.
However, I have found one case where it has been very useful to me:
I often bounce between 2 different development machines (one at the office, one at home, connected via VPN). If I am working on something, and I want to transfer it from home to work, or vice-versa, I often use shelving. I can shelve it from one machine and un-shelve it from the other. I do this when I am in the middle of a change, and checking in would break the build or otherwise interrupt other developers.
You are talking about two completely different concepts here. When you shelve code, you are saving it to TFS, but not checking it in to any particular branch. Creating a different workspace just sets up a new local folder on your development machines and saves the files in your branch there. When you do a check-in, you still could have conflicts.
Why not create a new branch of your code. You can work on that branch and check in without stepping on anyone else's changes, because you are checking in to your own branch of the code. Then, when you have completed your changes, and others have completed their's on the main branch, you can merge your changes into the main branch.
Shelving is the ideal option. Shelving allows you to make changes en masse in TFS outside the regular build, and retrieve them later by name. Multiple workspaces is not a solution for what you're doing. Multiple workspaces are good if you're maintaining different versions of a product and need to work on them, e.g. let's say you have a 4.0 and a 5.0 product and need to apply a security fix to both versions. Shelving is great when you want to make changes but not commit them immediately.