Feedback on Subversion

Eric Sullender of ELEVEN Wireless writes:

Saw your blog entry [about Subversion] today...

We started using Subversion at Eleven towards the end of last year. We've been very happy with it; it has been a great improvement over SourceSafe. We've been using Ankh to integrate with VisualStudio and some of us use Tortoise as a shell extension.

One thing the branching/tagging has really helped with is decoupling iterations from software releases. Being a hosted solution, in the past we were in the habit of releasing our software to the world after almost every iteration. This was a lot of overhead for the development team and wasn't very strategic from a business perspective.

Development still completes stories and has buildable complete version at the end of iterations, but management can determine what constitutes a given released version, prepare documentation and schedule the rollout while development can continue moving forward on new stories. It also allows us to have a tested, stable version ready well ahead of our scheduled maintenance/rollout window. If we ever have the need to do mid-iteration patches it also makes that process much easier.

I had used CVS in the past on a small project, so I knew that SVN would be an improvement over SourceSafe, but what I didn't realize is how much the added flexibility would have on our ability to develop agilely.

Eric adds that they're looking to hire an experienced C#/ASP.NET developer. It's not on their website yet, but if you're looking for a job in the Portland (Oregon) area, drop them a line.

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