Task based development provides companies with a competitive advantage by increasing to a great extent developers productivity and development isolation, providing project managers with powerful control over the content of their builds and greatly improving team communication and collaboration. Tasks help automate the developer´s activities, offering powerful functionalities for controlling the content of their builds.With Plastic SCM you can implement your task based development fast and efficiently, as simple as shown in this slide show:
Task Driven Development
Why is task based development so easy with Plastic? Simply said, because of its advanced branching model: Branching is one of the core Plastic SCM capabilities, and Branch Inheritance Technology is the key to maximize team productivity, easing integrations, and providing full traceability of the development. New visualizations provide the level of detail needed by the every team member, from a global view of the project status offered by the branch explorer, to the single item detail displayed on the 3D version tree.
Users must also take into account that to perform really powerful branching, a good merging mechanism is required, and merge tracking is the key of the process. Each time a merge is done, a link is created between the involved revisions. The link is not only important to illustrate the process (to be displayed on a version tree), but used internally by Plastic SCM to take the number of manual merge conflicts to the minimum. The overall result is a significant reduction of the time that developers spend on integrations.
Workspace Management is also key for task based development: The workspace is the place in your disk used to work against your SCM. But, what is loaded into a workspace? You decide what you have on your workspace depending on the way your team wants to work. And the way to tell Plastic what you want to see is by setting a selector. Each workspace has an associated selector, indicating the rules that load workspace contents.
Selectors are used to specify what branch, changeset, marker or checkout rule to apply for different items in your workspace, or even to mount several repositories on a single workspace.
As soon as you create a workspace and start working, the server will take care of what you have placed on it. You could, for instance, move a workspace from one machine to another, without having to move the physical files, just telling the Plastic server that the workspace is now on a new location.
Find more details on the advantages of Branch Inheritance technology for parallel development on the whitepaper: "Parallel development with Plastic SCM"
