2006: A Great Year for Windows IT Innovation

HONORABLE MENTION
Justin Selleck
Director of Operations, Smooth Fusion, Lubbock, Texas

Email: justinselleck@gmail.com

Decentralizing Web Development
Three years ago, IT pros at Smooth Fusion, a developer of enterprise Web applications, shared a common frustration: The process of developing and staging Web applications was hampered by a centralized environment. Developers used Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions for Web-site development. Whenever a developer changed a portion of code, all developers' code had to be checked out from the central development server, built, and checked in again. "This process consumed all my time, frustrated the project managers, and robbed the company of productivity," says Justin Selleck, Smooth Fusion's director of operations.

Justin, with help from Heath Bowlin, then director of network operations, decided to revamp the development environment, starting with eliminating the use of FrontPage Extensions in favor of Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, a version control system. "We moved to an isolated development environment where developers write the code on their own systems, check it into a development server, and build the application on that server once all the code is compiled together," says Justin.

Next, Justin created an application that runs on the Web server and lets the developers build their code on that server. Justin's application calls Mobi-Sys Software Products' VisualMake, which performs the build, and provisions build tasks for developers.

The final phase was to modify the staging and rollout processes. "Using the same application, I built a way for the project managers to stage the site out to the staging servers so the clients could see it,"Justin explains "I also added another level [to the application-testing process], where we test the Web site against the live database before actually going live. Finally, I created a Web site where our QA people can log in and call a script that rolls out an application that's ready to go live."

"The devprocess (as we call it) has truly revolutionized the way we do development," says Justin. "The solution increased developer productivity and lets project managers deliver changes to Web sites in minutes rather than hours. And now I can go home when it's still light!"