Infrastructure to increase productivity Hrush Nov 4, 2007

3 comments

We’ve been writing software at Cleartrip for over two years now. We don’t typically have the luxury of very long development cycles and requirements change virtually every day. Based on our experience so far, I’d like to share some of the things we think are vital to delivering software faster.

1. Have the ability to build and deploy your code regularly–this one is critical as building and deploying software can get out of hand very quickly. As the code grows, building and deploying it turns into a huge time-suck if you haven’t put in place the processes and tools to move your new code to your servers with minimal effort. Ideally, you should be able to build your code daily.
2. Write consistent code–wherever possible, reduce repetitive code elements into patterns that can then be reused and standardised. The best way to make sure different programmers are writing consistent code is to institute regular and consistent code reviews.
3. Test the code rigorously while writing it–if basic testing is done only at the end of development, then identifying and fixing bugs gets time consuming. If, on the other hand, you’re constantly testing the code as it is being developed, you’ll have far fewer bugs to fix in the final steps before releasing the code.
4. Automate regression testing–just like the processes and tools put in place for deploying code, you need processes and tools to regularly and effortlessly test the latest versions of your code. When you have the ability to do this, you become aware very quickly when some new code “breaks” something that was working before. Like the ability to build code daily, ideally you should be able to run your regression tests daily.

Doing the things listed above means you have to invest in the processes and tools that enable all these things–make sure you build this infrastructure early in your business.