AMT Blog

Best Practices: Utilizing Private Developer Workspaces

In order to fully realize the benefits of continuous integration, software development organizations need to ensure that developers can remain productive regardless of the overall state and stability of the project source code. To achieve this, private workspaces that give developers full SCM capability should be used. Private workspaces enable developers to

work in isolation
revert to known “good” states when needed
checkpoint their changes
share only mature, well-tested code with other team members

The benefits of isolation are bidirectional—it protects developers from incoming changes, and protects the shared code configuration from incomplete or incorrect changes from any one developer. By creating private workspaces, developers receive all the benefits of SCM for their personal use, including the ability to revert to a previous state, viewing and tracking of changes between software configurations, and setting aside changes to begin work on a different task.

Once a new known good state is reached (for example, when a developer completes engineering and testing work on a feature), developers should checkpoint their work, typically by “checking in” or “keeping” the local changes in the SCM system. The checkpoint ensures that the developer’s work is safe on the SCM server and that the checkpoint can be revisited at any time. However, since the changes have not been shared, other developers and teams are not affected.

When a developer breaks isolation and decides to share a code change, he or she is essentially making an assertion that the change has reached a higher level of maturity. This, coupled with the use of local developer builds, helps to ensure that only mature, well-tested code is passed on to the rest of the development team, a primary benefit of continuous integration.