Skip to main content
Software Engineering

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

11
  • 12
    +1: Someone's out sick, messing around on their workstation is probably going to be more cost than value. One person's already gone. Now another is wasting time trying to figure out what's going on. Huge management nightmare for no value. Until it's in source control, it never existed. Commented Jan 11, 2011 at 12:17
  • 1
    If he's off for the day? Yup, for the rest of the week? Maybe, for a month? No chance. This is one of those nasty "shades of grey" problems... we're back, again, to commit early, commit often - so the patterns don't necessarily need to be workstations but use of version control, but clearly its something worth thinking about. Commented Jan 11, 2011 at 12:48
  • 3
    @Murph: If the changes are committed somewhere every X days, the maximum amount of work that can be misplaced is X days' worth, and that's true no matter how long the developer is unavoidably out. The proper thing to do is to have policies about checking in frequently enough so that the amount of lost work is within acceptable bounds. Commented Jan 11, 2011 at 16:04
  • 2
    @Guzica The mention of "If it's fully baked code that's ready for release, it should be in source control." While true it should also be in source control when a stopping point is reached. Taking the approach you mention is precisely why a developer hoards their code on a local machine until it is "fully baked". Commented Jan 11, 2011 at 17:01
  • 2
    Legalities aside, it's quite disrespectful to open up a machine to rummage through code. Bad management (not requiring regular commits) does not ease the disrespect. A partial solution is to store working copies on a network drive that can be accessed in emergencies. Commented Jan 11, 2011 at 18:53