In this episode of coding blocks Allen Underwood, Michael Outlaw, Joe Zack addressed an issue in software construction that often makes or break a project/Team. Source control and management. I personally found this topic very crucial because of a programming project I was able to contribute to with a couple of my friends. Initially, we were just using Google drive to update and track project chances but as many newer version were created, it became a mess to try and track which update did what and how stable is that version. We eventually resulted to utilizing Gitlab. It was here that I found the importance of source control team working. We were able to section of parts of the project and distribute among ourselves also, it was easy to modify and make changes because we always know a Standard version of the project existed should we break the original pull. In this podcast episode, the authors made known of another major reason why implementing source control was effective. By implementing source control, many branches be worked on at the same time. This way, problems and bugs can be resolved and fixed faster. Also construction was made a little easy as people could work independently on building various parts of the software. Again by pushing after every working build, the programmer is able to leave a stable version with an attached commit message which help the next person to touch the code understand what that build accomplishes or does.
Best Practice Tip: Ensure that you only push back working code that passed the compilation test.
Another topic the authors addressed was the issue of missing path that often occurs with source control software development. They made emphasis that having a consistent naming convention is recommended for best practices because some programs and software requires you to switch between operating system and since that means different file systems, having a standard naming convention for packages and file paths makes it easier on who ever works on the program to make edits and changes as needed.
While addressing source control, another major topic to talk about is pull requests. It serves as another layer of verification and “code review”. Having push requests allows you to submit to a specific branch and get you work evaluated before pushing back to the main repository. This way leaders and managers can verify that code written is correct and fits the required standards and specifications.
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From the blog CS@Worcester – Le Blog Spot by Abranti3 Dada Kay and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.