Modified on
08 Aug 2022 01:55 pm
Skill-Lync
Fundamentals of Version Control and Test-Driven Development
Software developers are involved in the development of innovative products and services consumed by customers across the world. One of the most fundamental features of software development is release control. Practicing software development cannot take place without establishing a control system for releases.
Release control, in simple terms, is everything executed to deliver, identity, test, track, and preserve the software collateral, including files, source code, and anything other outcomes, which forms part of the software product.
This short blog will attempt to help such engineers understand the basics of version control and test-driven development. As a result, you'll be familiar with fundamentals such as the current trends in software development, version control systems, and best practices to execute version control/release control in an efficient manner.
In most cases, software development is all about rapid iterative development cycles. Earlier, development cycles could last for a month, then they came down to weeks and finally to an hour or even a few minutes.
The waterfall approach with its colorful Gantt charts as popular before, but the 21st-century software development uses agile methods to build software. Release control is no different.
That is the way things work due to the global distribution channels for almost all software.
Release engineering is moving to the cloud, similar to almost all development.
Dynamic and continuous delivery is becoming quite common.
No boundaries exist between development and operations anymore. Creation, packaging, and then handing over to ops engineers for putting it to production is no longer the norm.
While these are 3 of the most used integrated development environments, there are several others available as well.
Several infrastructure tools are now integrated. Tools such as GitHub and GitLab bring together version control and build issue tracking, testing, just to make it easy so that you don't have to exert effort to consolidate the environment together piece by piece.
In the age of iterations, test-driven development is a best practice to follow. Therefore, make sure to write your tests first. This point will be discussed in detail in the second installation of this blog.
Some widely used options are Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Release control is interesting because containers such as Docker are ubiquitous. Rather than installing a compiler and a linker, developers just bring down a docker container and run their builds.
Once you have all the pieces in place, it's time to execute a software build. The software build is the steps you take to compile and link your code through your source into object code, and that includes packaging of the code if you are going to add ZIP file or tar file on UNIX or LINUX. Source code and packaging dependencies are all part of the software build.
You should keep them in version control. For example, on Windows, you might use an InstallShield to build and install a program for the application. For Linux, you might build an RPM package making it easy for your customer to install the software that's all part of the build. And the files you build for that needs to be in the source control. It's part of your software, and it's important.
You can't have quality software if you can't name it. As the development cycles have become faster and shorter, the volume of changes made to software builds has increased. Therefore, numbered releases are quite common.
Numbered releases require a numbering scheme, to avoid confusions and redundancies in the collaborative development process. One of the suggested number schemes is the four-digit scheme below that provides the right balance between being short and flexible at the same time:
Software development has permeated almost all industries in the 21st century, including traditional processes in fields such as mechanical engineering. As such, release and version control is a crucial aspect for software engineers working the mechanical engineering related sectors such as automotive as well.
If you are interested in learning about the basics of version control and test-driven development, visit Skill-Lync for more information.
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ShruthiKrishnan
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Skill-Lync
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