Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!ukma!rutgers!cbmvax!vu-vlsi!swatsun!jackiw
From: jackiw@cs.swarthmore.edu (Nick Jackiw)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Project Management in LSP
Keywords: projects, segment, lightspeed, LSP
Message-ID: <2406@ilium.cs.swarthmore.edu>
Date: 7 Feb 89 17:05:33 GMT
Reply-To: jackiw@swatsun.UUCP ()
Distribution: na
Organization: Visual Geometry Project, Swarthmore College, PA
Lines: 41

Here's a question for any of you using LSP to work on mid- to large-scale
development projects.

Up til now, I've done most of my applications' development alone, and
consequently haven't had much problem keeping track of what does what
and where its doing it.  Browsing over past projects, I see that my
average number of units (source files) per segment is four or five, each
being 3-10K.

Recently, however, I've been working on a project large enough that at
some point my boss plans to hire a programming team to work on it. With
this comes necessarily increased attention to consistent documentation,
intra-team communication, etc. A preliminary analysis of the subsystems
involved in the entire project shows that a lot of small files (on the
order of 1/2K bytes) would be much more manageable ideally, just for
"division of labor" and "separation of functionality" and so-forth.

My question is: has anyone experienced practical drawbacks to having LOTS
of units in a project?  And (I guess this is directed to Rich S.), are 
their any limitations (absolute or relative) to LSP's internal implementation
of the unit list?  More generally, what sort of project fragmentation do
large-scale developers find best suits their needs?

I'm aware of obvious things like the increased file-system interaction
necessary to re-compile 10 small files rather than one large one, of
course. My interface-declarations are sufficiently sacrosanct that most
of my Code-Go-Debug-Go cycles don't trigger cascading recompilation of
dependent units, however.

Any thoughts or general discussion on this topic would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Nick



-- 
+-------------------+-jackiw@cs.swarthmore.edu / !rutgers!bpa!swatsun!jackiw-+
|  nicholas jackiw  | jackiw%campus.swarthmore.edu@swarthmr.bitnet           |
+-------------------+-VGP/MathDept/Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081--+
"I cannot approve thy marriage choices, son."(Samson's dad, _Samson Agonistes_)