Software methodology and Eclipse

Question

I have a question regarding the use of Eclipse and software methodology. I've a workspace containing projects with version 1. I've done with them, so I release these projects to QA, they are being test and they arrive to production. Then, I want to add new features to the projects, I'm now working on version 2. One day, production discovers a bug on the version they use, version 1. I need to reproduce the bug and to correct it, so I need to create another workspace, and to import the projects of the corresponding version, version 1.

Are there some best practices that help developers in these tasks? I'm open for all suggestions.

Thanks

Answer 1

Use version control with appropriate branching.

In my Eclipse environment, I have an Eclipse project for each branch under active development. If I'm not actively working on a given software project, I close that Eclipse project, but it's still in my workspace. All of my projects for a given program (in the company sense - a program has multiple engineering projects, and engineering projects might have 0 or more software projects).

For you, you might create a branch for your releases and check out that branch into an Eclipse project. When you release to QA, create a branch that they test. If they find problems, fix it in that branch and (if necessary) merge it into the main branch. There are other viable branching schemes as well.

Answer 2

Eclipse allows you to group Eclipse projects into 'working sets'. Sounds like what you want is a 'working set' for V1.0, where each module is it's own project, and a 'working set' for your current development, which is V2.0.

You can open/close all the projects in a working set at once, and collapse the working set into a single entry in the Package Explorer, so it shouldn't clutter up your workspace.

I personally like having everything in the same workspace, but if the above doesn't work for you, Eclipse can have multiple workspaces... just set Eclipse to ask what workspace to use on startup and point it to the workspace to need to work in.