12. Development Environment
The development environment section allows you to summarise how people new to your team install tools and setup a development environment in order to work on the software.
Intent
The purpose of this section is to provide instructions that take somebody from a blank operating system installation to a fully-fledged development environment.
Structure
The type of things you might want to include are:
- Pre-requisite versions of software needed.
- Links to software downloads (either on the Internet or locally stored).
- Links to virtual machine images.
- Environment variables, Windows registry settings, etc.
- Host name entries.
- IDE configuration.
- Build and test instructions.
- Database population scripts.
- Usernames,passwordsandcertificatesforconnectingtodevelopmentandtestservices. - Links to build servers.
- etc If you’re using automated solutions (such as Vagrant, Docker, Puppet, Chef, Rundeck, etc), it’s still worth including some brief information about how these solutions work, where to find the scripts and how to run them.
Motivation
The motivation for this section is to ensure that new developers can be productive as quickly as possible.
Audience
The audience for this section is the technical people in the software development team, especially those who are new to the team.
Required
Yes, because this information is usually lost and it’s essential if the software will be maintained by a different set of people from the original developers.