iSeries Projects and (beginning) XP status report

[Buck <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx>]

Wanted to let the list know how it's going.  I'm trying to get some XP 
(eXtreme Programming) techniques going in my RPG and CL programming and 
I thought I'd give iSeries Projects a try, mainly for the SVN 
integration.  I figured I'd keep many versions of the code as I went along.

In general, I don't think iSeries Projects is a particularly good fit 
for XP.  Not because there's something wrong with iSeries Projects, just 
that it's probably not the right tool for the job.

The Subversion integration is okay, but mostly manual.  That is, I don't 
get a new rev every time I open a member for editing.  And by the way, 
once you've opened a member for editing under iSP, don't open it later 
with RSE or SEU.  Things get confused quickly, and the repository thinks 
it's the member of record which will result in the loss of changes.

There's a bug trying to look at version history.  If you click on a 
member (say at version 14) and right click, team, history you see the 
history.  Click on a different member (say at version 12) and it doesn't 
show the history for that member.  You have to do it again.

Compilation is a pain.  Again, iSP wasn't intended for a rapid edit, 
compile, test cycle so I can hardly blame WDSC for my misuse of it.  I 
found it unpleasantly easy to compile the wrong member (right click, 
remote, compile, compile.)

When ready to integrate, iSeries Projects deploys only to a single 
'test' library.  Not fun when one has a production deployment that goes 
into multiple libraries.

All things considered, I think I'll be doing the next iteration with RSE 
and skipping Subversion.  I didn't get enough value out of the 
experiment to stay with it for a project that is strictly RPG and CL. 
If the whole shop used WDSC and Subversion, I might change my opinion, 
but as a solo effort, it was more work than it was worth to me.
  --buck