We all know that AccuRev is well suited for large enterprises with teams of developers spread across the globe. But what about the crack team of one developer? You know, those of use who go solo because we know we can do it faster, better, and leaner than any contrived dream team.

Can AccuRev really work for small teams including a team of one? … You bet your ASCII it does!

In fact, I use AccuRev for my own personal projects. They happen to be AccuRev integrations, but are software projects nonetheless [Vim Plugin, GNU Bash, etc]. At this point, critics may proclaim, “For one developer, you just need to commit to trunk and label for each release.” Well… that worked OK for the first and second release, but then came the need to maintain multiple versions in parallel with patch releases (due to wholescale refactoring per major release) as well as compatibility between corresponding versions of AccuRev (since these are plugins). The compatibility matrix completely obliterates any suggestion of linear branching/labeling… so fuh-get-abot-it. Time to graduate from the traditional branch-based tools.

click to enlarge

The above picture shows my stream structure containing projects including vim-plugin and bash-completion. I’ll use the bash-completion project as a reference example to discuss my pattern of development. Even as a single developer, I found it critical to maintain a strict develop -> test -> release pattern simply because my development activities change day-to-day and typically turn into “It’s been a month since I looked at this code… time to roll up the sleeves and figure out what the heck I was thinking!” If I was forced to a single commit bucket (branch), I’d go nuts — trying to manage multiple patches, new development, updates to documentation, etc and then being forced to deliver it all because pulling out changes is about as fun as filling sandbags with a pitch fork… I’d rack my brains trying to keep it all straight especially since I have multiple projects going on concurrently!

My development process is as follows (annotated as steps 1-6 on the picture):

1. Develop – After working in my private workspace on a unit of work for days, weeks, months, I promote to the “-test “stream. Then, continue working in the private workspace on the next set of work.
2. Test – After unit testing and performing a clean-room functional test of all changes in my “-test” stream, I deem all changes “release ready” and promote to the top bash-completion stream.
3. Release Candidate — The changes in the base stream represent a configuration that is good-enough to start a new codeline. I do NOT snapshot an official release X.Y (just yet). I first create a “dash-x” line to start the codeline (e.g. bash-completion-3.x for the 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, etc versions).
4. Maintenance — In anticipation for even minor patch work, I proactively create a “-maint” stream to collect any upcoming maintenance changes based on the starting codeline. Initially, this stream will just be empty and identical in configuration to the parent ‘dash-x’ stream.
5. Official Release — At this point, I’ve immediately created the”dash-x” and “-maint” streams in succession so they are all identical in contents – namely, all containing the next release. So NOW I create my first official “dot oh” release (e.g. bash-completion-3.0).
6. Publish – With the official configuration under snapshot, I ‘pop’ the code, archive, and ship to my web server. La commedia e finite!

With the visual nature of the StreamBrowser and the ease of creating streams, managing multiple versions of multiple products with AccuRev is priceless. I use a simple, repeatable development pattern that lets me separate ongoing development work (workspaces) from upcoming changes being tested (-test stream) all separate from previous releases (dash-x) and patch development (-maint). And the best part about all of this is I can (and have, MANY times) come back to any project even months later and quickly ascertain the current state of the union — what’s in development, what’s in test, which releases are published, etc. Sweet.

Lastly, while I use this ‘dot oh’ pattern for my own projects, I even recommend it for large team development. It’s a great pattern and I hope you find it useful for your own stream management.

/happy releasing/ – dave