The Search for Good Tools
Several tools were heavily advocated in Lean Software Development. They want us to use a wiki. Sure, no problem! Two of us are already heavy into Wikipedia, and our project already has a wiki set up on an internal server. Except, umm, it's not based on MediaWiki, it's running something else. That something else doesn't share MediaWiki's markup language and doesn't seem configured to accept images. Argh. Continuous build tools-where changes in the repository are compiled and tested almost as quickly as they're committed-were high on the list. CruiseControl, which insists on server-side JSP, was the top choice. Why is it that all continuous build tools seem to require that I be running something fancy on the web server? Can't any of them just spit out static HTML logs to a specified directory? Oh, and CruiseControl wants Ant as the underlying build tool. I've been assured I can have Ant call make, but that's one more thing to configure. And then there's the refactoring tool they recommended . . . $400 per seat. Ouch. We played with the free demo version on some C code. Once it's configured for a given checkout, it offers very spiffy navigation tools and some moderately spiffy refactoring tools. Configuring for a checkout, though, is a major hassle. It doesn't parse makefiles for header directories, for example. Those must be typed in. Great. find . -name "*.[ch]" | etags - is looking better by the second.