Starting fresh every morning, rebuilding a development image every day

by Yann Monclair

Source code management, version management, and release management are issues which are taking a greater place in our development cycles than used to. The needs have increased, as well as the demand. Not managing your code branch properly can lead you to lose a lot of time in the delivery stages of your work cycle, as the application can not be built easily, when it should.

Kapital tries to address such issues by rebuilding images every day. Every morning, the developers get the latest version of the development image. Using a fresh image every day allows us to gain time on merges, and enables us to cope with work coming into the repository from over 70 developers, split between various sites and timezones. I would like to share my experience in managing this process and working with it for the last 18 months. This is a good developer practice, and can save developers a lot of time by avoiding issues and dead ends other ways of handling source code and version build could lead to.

Bio: Yann has worked on JPMorgan's Kapital since February 2007. Yann is a young and enthusiastic Smalltalker. He studied Smalltalk in university, and has been involved in programs like the ESUG SummerTalk and the student volunteers at Smalltalk Solutions and ESUG. After graduating from his masters, Yann worked for a few months as a research assistant with Bernard Pottier, before joining the Kapital team at JPMorgan Glasgow. This is Yann's first talk in an international conference.

Video: Youtube