Development Environments
Hi all,
Do you find setting up development environments time-consuming, painful and difficult? Do you forget which little configuration change in your IDE you have to make? I have recently gone through the exercise of helping 10 or so new developers set-up their J2EE development environment. I have a few random thoughts on the process that may make your life easier, or not!
1.) Document it. And I don't just mean "Install XP, then Install Office, then install JDK, then install Eclipse". I mean document it _properly_ with screen shots if necessary. Make it so that the most junior of code monkeys can do the installs without your supervision.
2.) Test the process on sucker, oops! I mean person number one. I actually had our QA (computer literate, but not a Java developer) set-up a development environment to test the doc out. The doc got some needed improvements and she gained an appreciation of the complexity behind what we do, always a nice bonus!
3.) Plan on 2 working days for a reasonably complex J2EE environment. It takes me about a day to do the s/w installs and usually day two is spent on code/project configuration. Make sure your PM has this factored in!
I could say a lot more but then you'd fall asleep at your keyboards.. but feel free to comment away!
Cheers,
Martijn
Do you find setting up development environments time-consuming, painful and difficult? Do you forget which little configuration change in your IDE you have to make? I have recently gone through the exercise of helping 10 or so new developers set-up their J2EE development environment. I have a few random thoughts on the process that may make your life easier, or not!
1.) Document it. And I don't just mean "Install XP, then Install Office, then install JDK, then install Eclipse". I mean document it _properly_ with screen shots if necessary. Make it so that the most junior of code monkeys can do the installs without your supervision.
2.) Test the process on sucker, oops! I mean person number one. I actually had our QA (computer literate, but not a Java developer) set-up a development environment to test the doc out. The doc got some needed improvements and she gained an appreciation of the complexity behind what we do, always a nice bonus!
3.) Plan on 2 working days for a reasonably complex J2EE environment. It takes me about a day to do the s/w installs and usually day two is spent on code/project configuration. Make sure your PM has this factored in!
I could say a lot more but then you'd fall asleep at your keyboards.. but feel free to comment away!
Cheers,
Martijn
