There’s tons of developers that are self employed, freelance or consultant; some who take long term contracts on teams and others that have a few key, stable customers that they routinely work for. If you’re solo in the sense that you’re the primary start-to-finish person for most of your projects, there’s not a lot of resources out there targeted your way. Most training, talks, books, blog posts and other content is geared toward the enterprise developer that works on a team. Since that’s the case, I wanted to throw out a few things you can do as a solo developer to take some of the pain away from not having the resources that teams generally have (e.g., hardware, CI server, costly software developer tools, etc…) to help boost your productivity.
Use Source Code Control
Many solo developers have managed with their own way of using “copy & paste” source control. While you might have a routine down when doing so, you can still benefit from even some of the basic features of source control – with actual source control being the first reason. There’s lots of room for mistake when something’s done manually, particularly when that something is maintaining versions of sets of files.
Source control systems offer basic tracking of files and project assets that you’ll label with a version, and most integrate with familiar tools like Visual Studio (often including express versions). SCC software also allows you to freely explore code you’d like to write without you having to mentally keep track of changes when changing code, you can work on multiple files and roll back any or all of them to their previous state, without worry. It’s safe to say that most developers have experienced this pain at least once in their career – that is, chasing an idea with many changes to the code and when the developer’s ready to ditch the changes, s/he can’t recall what’s been changed.
Download TFS Basic for Visual Studio 2010 for individual source code control, and you can also use other popular SCC programs like Tortoise SVN.
Try out some Agile practices
Although you can’t do 100% Scrum (an Agile subset) as an individual developer you can do some of it. Obviously it’s silly to do daily standups as an individual, but you can still incorporate many parts of Agile and/or Scrum into your projects.
The Agile manifesto states the principles that Agile values…
“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a planThat is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.”
These principles are easy to follow as an individual developer or as a team, it works for everyone.
One of the most important things to remember is to keep the feedback loop with your client open, and have frequent discussions with the client about the progress of the app. Respond to change by allowing the feedback from the customer to drive the next cycle of coding, which should be short (1-2 weeks). As a solo developer, you can create and use backlogs, use burn down charts and hold retrospectives with the customer. Those practices give a nice reality check as to the health of the project.
JD Meier’s blog with living Agile
Unit Testing – It’s for you too.
You may be thinking unit testing is overkill for the type of projects you work on particularly if they’re small projects, or that it’d cost too much to ramp up to speed with a testing framework and tools. If so, you’re not alone, as those are some common misconceptions that solo developers make (perhaps because they’re not getting out to mingle with their professional peers and aren’t getting up to date info; see below 😉 ).
If you’re looking for a low friction way to get started with unit testing and you’re already using Visual Studio 2010, then try the built in MS Test tools. After you get a solid feel for creating unit tests; the knowledge is there to compare other tools & testing frameworks such as nUnit or xUnit (xUnit was built by Brad Wilson on the ASP.NET team).
One of the primary goals of ASP.NET MVC is to promote a concept called “convention over configuration”. This means when writing MVC applications, developers are guided to use test projects when without having to download separate utilities, as well as guided to use other best practices. By using the conventions, your code will be cleaner and better, especially because you’re now testing.
Get out and mingle with your professional peers
Don’t get out to user groups? Code Camps? It’s a great place to network and learn new things, and keep your skills sharper than they’d be without. Get on social networking like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. These are all great ways to keep in touch with other developers, many of whom are also solo devs. Having an issue? Post the question on forums such as http://www.asp.net or MSDN Forums (among many others). Send out a tweet on Twitter and watch the replies come in, or post questions on a blog, many of who are on the various product teams here at Microsoft. Getting an answer from the source or a trusted MVP or community members is a great way to expand your knowledge base, stay up to date, and see what’s important out there to other developers.
Rachel Appel 