HACKER Q&A
📣 BraverHeart

What does a large application's daily development workflow look like?


Example: Chromium takes hours to compile, how do engineers iterate and test their code in a reasonable amount of time?

Other examples: Photoshop, Firefox, Microsoft Word, Safari, etc.

  👤 Leftium Accepted Answer ✓
I used to work on MS Windows/Office from Korea. It took 15+ hours to build.

- The devs all had multiple (4+) computers so they could work on other stuff while waiting for builds. Everyone had a KVM to switch between computers. Later virtual machines were utilized to make even more virtual dev machines.

- Also tried to schedule full builds so they could be done overnight/during the weekend.

- Of course, incremental builds after only changing a few files didn't take nearly as long. (But a full build was needed to test the changes still worked with the ever-changing code base.)

- Dev and test teams were separate, so I'm not sure what the process was for the test team.

- This was back in 2009 (and there is no longer a dev team at MS Korea office.)