I think it’s an awesome idea. Blogging about stuff like this is a first step and your checklist is something every infrastructure guy should take into account when kicking off a project.

However, I think most of the problems are not technical, they arise due to the lack of resources or priorities. If project leads or people in charge don’t make sure that this kind of infrastructure and the necessary processes around it are in place BEFORE development begins, there is no way that they are able to make up for it afterwards. You will have unhappy developers who spend hours a day waiting for build or merging conflicts. You’ll have project managers who cannot just add another programmer, because it takes days to setup his dev environment. It’s a ripple effect which will eventually lead to the failure of the project in one or the other way.

As long as management or project lead don’t recognize the amazing effect a great development environment has, on the people, as well as on the resulting software, infrastructure will stay something that is neglected in every software project….just like testing and software quality.

Maybe some companies don’t have the resources (or priorities) to even get things started. Perhaps a community project that provides development guidelines (style guide, repo structure, release management strategy etc.) could help here. Organizations could take what they need and adopt it to their needs. What do you think?

And that’s where I think the problems begin! A project must have someone who is in charge of this stuff, someone who is responsible for it! It’s not our job as sane developers, who FEEL responsible for it, to do this! Why? Because it is almost a full time job to setup this kind of infrastructure and it takes up even more time to keep it up to date and running.

IMHO if project management is incapable of putting someone in charge or even worse if they don’t want to, then the project is doomed to fail! It might sound drastic, but I think being blunt about such an important topic is the only way to go.

At my current project we half this position filled half heartedly which leads to the “broken window syndrome” – e.g. CI fails and nobody feels responsible for it and the poor person which is in charge has other problems and no time to check on it.