How Authoritative repositories make you deliver projects faster

In your daily routine, as a CTO, have you experienced users complaining that bugs which were fixed in the previous release have re-appeared in the current release? or Features that were available in the previous version have altogether disappeared? YES? Then your source code is suspect, Its time to implement an authoritative repository from which source is fetched for builds that are deployed in UAT and thereon to "Production".

As part of our outreach programme we conduct a boot camp for students wanting to learn Cloud Computing. This week the partcipants were asked to write a programme using JavaScript to calculate the interest on a Principal of INR 2 crores. As expected most of them completed writing the programmes on time. We asked them what happens if a person using their programmes provides an amount greater than or lesser than INR 2 Crores. The blank stares from the participants it was clear that none of them ran any tests! The participants quickly realised their mistake and went on to fix their programmes to include error messages. We then asked the students to show us both the versions. Lo and bhold few of them had the previous versions undera different name while several of them had made changes to their programmes without backing them up. The ones that had the previous version had to search their directories to locate it. The point is this. A similar situation exists in Project teams. Programme files get overwritten leading to features vanishing in subsequent releases or bugs resurfacing.

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If a boot camp participant spends so much time to locate previous versions of the programme imagine the time that team members on a large project would spend looking for something that they would have written during the course of the Project. Deploying an Authoritative Distributed Source Code Repository will ensure that Source Code is no longer suspect. It also offers the following advantages

1. Commits are tagged with the name of the developer. Thereby assigning responsibility.

2. The Facility to rollback to a previous commit if the current commit is faulty.

3. The facility to create branches so that developers can work simultaneously on bugs and features as well as future releases

4. The facility to accomplish distributed development so that each developer has a copy of the source code and develop and test on their local machine.

At Sastra we use GIT as our Authoritative repository. Our GIT repository is over 12 years old and contains all our source code on the cloud. Developers use a pre-defined workflow to develop and test. Combined with our CI/CD infrastructure we are able to offer tremendous value to our clients. If you would like to see how Authoritative Repositories work please get in touch with the author of this post.