It definitely takes a little getting used to, but you’ll find it works out pretty well if you invest in an integration server to test things end-to-end and focus testing on your machine using unit testing techniques and automated methods. The virtualized development environments tend to be responsive enough, but you may notice booting an app server with a giant portal stack to test end to end can be a little sluggish. In that case, just do it in a real integration environment. Setting one up (that’s specific to you or a few people) isn’t a huge deal once you have an image, either and we’ve found it’s quite easy to throw hardware at that performance problem.

Plus they’re way easy to back up and recover. Can’t say enough good stuff about them – you should really take a closer look IMO.

Thanks! And that’s exactly it. The bigger the team (and the longer lived the code base) the more expensive the cost.

And you’re absolutely right about system configurations such as registry settings, etc. I thought I had included it, but after going over it again 2-3 times I can’t find any reference to this. Great catch!

To add, as well as system settings (registries, environment variables, etc.), you can also add a bunch of utility scripts (batch files for Windows and shell scripts for Linux/Unix). Basically anything that’s the developers will need.

Thanks Steph!

The only issue with VMWare images is that you lose a lot of performance. And performance is critical while developing. If you slow down a developer by 50%, you lose 50% of your value.

And if by some odd chance it takes more than a few seconds to do something, you’ve lost their focus. Which means they now need to get back into the same mindset. So instead of a few seconds, or even a minute or two, the cost can quickly escalate to 10-15 minutes to get back into the same mindset!

Which is why I always always recommend pushing developer hardware. Even if they don’t need it all the time, it’s so inexpensive compared to the developer’s time that you can’t go wrong. Plus it gives you the added benefit of showing you care about your developers.

I’m starting to think that it should be taken a step further: Perhaps development is an operation that should take place within a VMWare image. So, on your first day, simply:

* Retrieve the VMWare image.
* Do an “update” on the code repository.
* Build.