Team Development

Presented byHOnza KoudelkaMilan ZachMichal PlachýPetr Konta

Agenda

• Pros/Cons of Team Development

• Development Tools for Teams

• Developing with FileMaker Server

• Local vs Development Server vs Production Server

• Conventions, Technical Documentation

• Developer Collisions

• Tales for Males

• Open Discussion

Pros/Consof Team Development

⊕ Faster delivery

⊕ Learning from each other

⊕ Project focused atmosphere

⊕ Consulting fights blindness

⊕ One ship attitude

⊕ Out of the box thinking

⊕ Team responsibility

⊖ Not for small solutions

⊖ Speed growth not linear

⊖ Bigger team => higher costs

⊖ Team responsibility

Development Tools for Teams

• Inspector Pro / Base Elements

• FM Bench

• Project Management System

• Redmine

• Basecamp

• Custom

• FileMaker Server

• Evernote

Developing withFileMaker Server

• Separate servers for Development, Production, Testing

• Progressive backups

• Deployment

• Logs & Stats

• Remote access for customers

Local vs Development Server vs Production Server

• Strong visual indication

• Global fields behavior

• Hidden file settings

• Custom orders, window positions, toolbars, Inspector

• Security settings - fmapp

• allow for server, disallow for local

Conventions, Technical Documentation

• Same rules for the whole team

• Same rules for all solutions

• Developer replaceability

• References to PMS everywhere

• Comments, comments, comments...

• Takes a little, saves a lot (of time)

Developer Collisions

• Database design

• Security settings

• Editing Scripts

• Assign tasks to developers by type

• Save changes often

Tales for Males

• Stories about what we learned in our real projects:

• Compo Tech - Faster development via conventions

• NPÚ - wrong data, not code

• CIS - TO naming makes searching difficult

• FM Bench - QuickSort

Compo TechFaster parallel development via conventions

• First developer creating fields and relationships

• Second developer designing layouts

• Third developer writing calculations in scripts

• Strict naming conventions allow for referring to fields and related tables before they are created, then just commiting the finished calculation

NPÚ - wrong data, not code

• Deployed a new version of our solution at client’s site

• Client missed images in the new version

• After a stressful afternoon trying to find a bug in our code we discovered the source data were wrong

• Conclusion: Verify what you get from someone else before continuing the work - you are not the only one who makes mistakes

CIS - TO naming makes searching difficult

• Our own internal solution - started many years ago

• Originally, we though it was a good idea to prefix all table occurrence names with the solution name (cis_) to differentiate from external data sources

• Now it appears to be a bad idea

• It’s slow to find a TO in the graph

• It’s easier to make mistakes

FM Bench - QuickSort

• Our own optimization tool needed an optimization

• We identified one custom function as its bottleneck

• Then we replaced it with a plug-in function

• Overcoming the FileMaker developer’s natural hesitation to use plug-ins allowed us to take advantage of having plug-in developers in our team

• Don’t forget your team mates can help you

Our Team is Availableto help you with your challenges

•24uSoftware.com/CustomDev

•24uSoftware.com/DevSupport

•FMBench.com/berlin