Common libraries in a large team

Question

Assume you have five products, and all of them use one or more of the company\'s internal libraries, written by individual developers.

It sounds simple but in practice,

Answer 1

Treat the development of the libraries like any other product. Each library has its own repository, its own releases and version numbers. The compiled and officially tested versions of the library are also kept in the repository. Document features and changes from version to version.

Then use the libraries like you would using third party libraries. Your product uses only fixed versions of the compiled libraries. Switch to a new version when you really need to and be aware that this involves more testing. Add the versions you use to your version control.

When you find a bug or require a new feature in a library, a new version or sub-version is created. Using a version control system like svn makes this easy. When you need the source code for debugging purposes, export it and include it in your projects, but do not change it there, but fix problems in the libraries' repositories.

This way, every team can contribute to the libraries without endangering the work of the other teams. Switching versions is done deliberately and not by accident.