Ask HN: What does a large application's daily development workflow look like?
1 comments
I used to work on MS Windows/Office from Korea. It took 15+ hours to build.
- The devs all had multiple (4+) computers so they could work on other stuff while waiting for builds. Everyone had a KVM to switch between computers. Later virtual machines were utilized to make even more virtual dev machines.
- Also tried to schedule full builds so they could be done overnight/during the weekend.
- Of course, incremental builds after only changing a few files didn't take nearly as long. (But a full build was needed to test the changes still worked with the ever-changing code base.)
- Dev and test teams were separate, so I'm not sure what the process was for the test team.
- This was back in 2009 (and there is no longer a dev team at MS Korea office.)
- The devs all had multiple (4+) computers so they could work on other stuff while waiting for builds. Everyone had a KVM to switch between computers. Later virtual machines were utilized to make even more virtual dev machines.
- Also tried to schedule full builds so they could be done overnight/during the weekend.
- Of course, incremental builds after only changing a few files didn't take nearly as long. (But a full build was needed to test the changes still worked with the ever-changing code base.)
- Dev and test teams were separate, so I'm not sure what the process was for the test team.
- This was back in 2009 (and there is no longer a dev team at MS Korea office.)
How did you learn to tolerate this long cycle of engineering, compared to say building a service that can rebuild in a second?
Other examples: Photoshop, Firefox, Microsoft Word, Safari, etc.