Setting up a new Java development shop

Question

I\'m setting up a Java development shop, currently just for myself as the only developer, but with hopes of needing to hire others as the business grows. Obviously I\'m hoping

Answer 1

We have been using:

version control:

• subversion - Its not distributed but it is accessible over a few different protocols if firewalls are an issue. I'm not sure if distributed version control is necessary for us and reading Eric Sink's take is entertaining at least

issue tracking :

• Fogbugz - You get some team discussion and communication for free with it because of the built-in wiki and discussion boards.

continuous integration:

• CruiseControl - we had been talking about switching to Hudson, but Cruise is working really well right now - it runs our unit tests.

dev environment:

• Netbeans and Eclipse - There is really no reason to pay for a Java IDE. An import point for getting going fast is that Netbeans and Eclipse both store all of their project data as text files which version control nicely. See this question. We had giant headaches when using an IDE which used binary project files.

profiler:

• JDK VisualVM - Its free and it works. I used to really like YourKit, but VisualVM does so much now.

documention:

• Combination of javadoc and fogbugz wiki pages plus the cruise dashboard for internal. For external we are using RoboHelp and we dislike it.

other tools:

• Findbugs - huge help in catching things that are sometimes really stupid and sometimes amazing quirks that you'd have never realized. PMD is good for some of this as well.
• We find chat tools to be really helpful for communication. We used to have access to Sametime and it had a giant conferencing feature that was really great. That was taken away for an unknown reason by the overlords though.