Good project management practices and well-defined development workflows are essential to the success of any large-scale software project. Common malpractices committed by developers include neglecting to test, putting off documentation, and not following the DRY ("don’t repeat yourself") principle, to name a few. This behavior can result in buggy production code, longer development cycles, and slower ramp-up time for new developers, among other things. By using automation tools, we can ensure that the boring and repetitive, yet essential, tasks of project management, documentation, and unit testing get done without developers having to think about it. Applied properly, these tools can reduce frustration, increase productivity, and result in both happier developers and better software.

In the Web and Mobile Applications group at the Texas Advanced Computing Center we have implemented a project management and automation process for our large-scale web application projects using Apache Maven [1] for project management and dependency handling and Grunt [2] for common task execution. We also utilize other tools including Bower [3] for JavaScript library management, Sass [4] and Compass [5] for managing stylesheets, and Doxygen [6] for generating documentation. This talk will show how developers can implement these tools in order to speed up their development, reduce frustration, and improve the quality of their software.

[1] http://maven.apache.org/
[2] http://gruntjs.com/
[3] http://bower.io/
[4] http://sass­lang.com/
[5] http://compass­style.org/
[6] http://doxygen.org