Version Control Blog

Brian Harry shares an inside story about how the branches are organized in Developer Division at Microsoft. They use many branches (called “virtual build labs”), with strict rules for moving changes between labs. Private branches and release branches are also used extensively. The post is quite old (November 2005), and they seem to be already switching to feature branches. But nevertheless, it’s a good read. Some arithmetics: I’d estimate that we have on the order of 800 developers[…]. Let’s imagine for a minute that any given developer has a brain fart and checks in a build break, serious bug, etc once every 6 months (which in my opinion would be a team of 800 of the best developers I’ve ever met). There’s about 250 working days in a year and simple math says 800 * 2 / 250 > 6 serious bugs checked in every single working day. The fact is it’s higher than that. Read more on how they cope with that scale of bugs at Brian Harry: “Branch structure in Developer Division at Microsoft”. (via notgartner blog)

Recent posts on similar topics

• AccuRev streams vs branches - January 14th, 2008
• Robin Luckey: "The World's Oldest Source Code Repositories" - October 18th, 2007
• Tim O'Reilly: Why Congress Needs a Version Control System - October 7th, 2007
• Mark Shuttleworth on renaming and merging - October 7th, 2007
• Linus Torvalds: Re: clarification on git, central repositories and commit access lists - August 27th, 2007

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 24th, 2006 at 3:42 am and is filed under branching and merging, Use cases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.