Team Development Concepts
By working with a team of developers, you can create applications faster, and can develop more complex applications. You can blend the skills of different developers to create applications that would be difficult or impossible for a single developer to create.
However, team development requires extra effort in the development process. Successful team development depends on:
- Allowing several developers to work with the same projects and databases at the same time.
- Coordinating the changes that are made to the same programs, forms, or other application elements, so that one developer's changes don't overwrite those of another developer.
- Allowing developers to enhance existing application elements (for example, programs or class libraries) without affecting the work of other developers who are currently using these elements.
For example, imagine that your team is developing a complex application. Because the application is large, Visual FoxPro must allow several developers to be working at once on different components of the application. However, you want to be sure that only one developer at a time works on an individual element, such as a form, so that one developer doesn't overwrite the changes made by another developer.
Furthermore, you want that developer to be able to code, test, and debug a form without affecting the other developers (and users) who continue working with an earlier version of the form. When the first developer is finished with the new form, the enhancements can then be integrated into the application.
You can follow the methods recommended in this section for coordinating the work of multiple developers. For example, this section provides information on how you can work with projects and class libraries in a multi-developer environment.
See Also
Developing in Teams | Source Control Features | Management of Visual FoxPro Projects under Source Control | Management of Files in a Source-Controlled Project | Development and Modification of Databases in Teams