We are in the process of hiring new developer’s, and our current
strategy is to allow developer’s to choose whatever computer and
operating system they want. So far we have 1 guy using a mac, 1 guy
on Vista, 1 guy on vista running Ubuntu through VMWare, and one guy on
Ubuntu. Our QA hardware we deploy to is FreeBSD. I’d love to get
people’s opinion’s/experiences with working in a mixed environment.
I think running to many flavors can cause trouble down the track as
you expand, and developers demand different programs and
applications. And the incompatibility of software between the 3 OS.
One good benefit to having different OS is that you can more options
to do testing in browsers. Sadly, Its important to have access to XP
somehow (Even if its a XP image through vmware) so that you can do UI
testing in IE 6. There are ways around this by having browsers shots,
but these don’t expose some UI bugs.
If you do give developers options try and keep most on same flavors,
like allowing only Ubuntu for linux, XP for windows and Mac well just
OSX, This will at least give them some options however allows you some
control.
Also if you server is FreeBSD that is ok, if you concerned about
Development Environment issues, then I would suggest having a staging/
proofing server to allow tests to be conducted on similar servers to
the production ones, with out having an effect on the live data.
keith wrote:
We are in the process of hiring new developer’s, and our current
strategy is to allow developer’s to choose whatever computer and
operating system they want. So far we have 1 guy using a mac, 1 guy
on Vista, 1 guy on vista running Ubuntu through VMWare, and one guy on
Ubuntu. Our QA hardware we deploy to is FreeBSD. I’d love to get
people’s opinion’s/experiences with working in a mixed environment.
Technologically that’s heaven.
However, are you set up for pair programming? We use three keyboards,
three
monitors, and two CPUs at one pair station. This system depends on a
coherent user interface, where we all know the same editor, and nobody
should get used to sucky keymappings (such as End keys that don’t go to
the
end of the line, or borrowing Caps L. for Control…)
–
Phlip
Test Driven Ajax (on Rails) [Book]
“Test Driven Ajax (on Rails)”
assert_xpath, assert_javascript, & assert_ajax