Common libraries in a large team

Question

Assume you have five products, and all of them use one or more of the company\'s internal libraries, written by individual developers.

It sounds simple but in practice,

Answer 1

I used to work in a similar situation to what you're describing, only my company had dozens of software products. I worked on the team that was responsible for maintaining and upgrading the core set of libraries that everyone else used.

We dealt with those scenarios as follows:

1. Test the heck out of the core libraries. Maintaining duplicate code is a nightmare. You're not just maintaining the core and one copy. Somewhere in your company's source control there are several copies of the same code. We had dozens of products, so that would have meant dozens of copies. Hunt them down and kill them.

2. We had a small team of 10-12 developers dedicated to maintaining the core library and its test suites. We were also responsible for fielding calls from the other 1100 developers in the company about how to use the core library, so as you can imagine, we were very busy.

3. Each other project needs to work with the version of the core library that it is known to work with. You can use version control branches to test new releases of the core library with old products to make sure you don't break code that works. If the core team does a thorough job of testing, this should go very smoothly. The only time this ever got really complicated for us was when the core API changed, or when we flat out screwed something up. Even if you're very confident in your core testing, use branches to test individual products.