A large part of my current activities is organizing a software development department. I am beginning a series of posts where I am going to share how I have decided to tackle each aspect of the software development process.
First let me tell you that I am greatly influenced by Joel Spolsky and his articles at Joel on Software. The now classic Joel Test article contains 12 steps that can serve as a checklist. Doing all or almost all of them will certainly improve your software development process. Except reading Joel, I learned a lot by reading many articles from various blogs written by software gurus.
In my upcoming first part post, I am going to describe to you how I setup version control, which version control system I chose and why it is essential to have a version control system setup. In the meantime reading The Joel Test will help you understand why should anyone get in the trouble of organizing the software development process.