Programming Team Best Practices

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Woolly

Hm... that's why most of my team sticks to cheez-its.

On a more serious note, with the recent expansion of our programming team, we're going to have to move to actual program team management rather than 3 guys keeping each-other in the loop.
So yeah, we're looking to go to some sort of SVN or git Version Control. One issue we've come up upon is that many version control systems aren't exactly designed for a graphical programming language such as Labview. We're kind of looking at running Tortise SVN and hosting our code on Google code, though if git-hub has a better password system than Google code and isn't blocked by our school's overprotective firewall, I'd be willing to switch in a heartbeat.
We're also working on/ironing out some naming and documentation standards for our team. Just something to keep from having confusion come up later, such as the classic "What is Math.vi?".

Being on a time going through the same kind of growing pains (3 programmers last year to 10 this year), these are a lot of the same questions we've been asking ourselves, and I am very curious about what other teams are going to say. Thanks to those who've already been responding, we're definitely taking your thoughts into consideration as we prepare for the upcoming season.

While operating in an environment you may not have internet access I suggest git as the version control system. It is distributed which means you can utilize it without access to the server. I suggest reading up on it.