When you are working on a software, it is not just code that you need to be worried about. A typical large software will contain a large amount of stuff besides the code that your software engineers write. When you look at the menus of the software, there might be cute icons to depict certain functions, or even if you look at the typical Undo option that sits in the Edit menu of a large number of options, there would be a button that you could hit for doing the Undo. If you look at Microsoft office recent versions, there would be a ribbon kind of menu at the top that will have a lot of options, and all of these are complemented by the visual appearance of icons. Typically, software makers try to ensure that their software has easy to remember buttons / icons that users remember and which makes the software apparently more usable by consumers.
However, for code, you would use some sort of code repository; but the same is not truly the same for non-code items such as buttons and other graphic options. Well, actually you can store such icons / visual items in the source safe but you will not be able to do operations such as comparisons between different versions of these items, and in fact, only when you actually export the history of such graphics from the source safe, will you be able to visualize what a previous version of the graphic items looks like.
One of the big challenges that software makers have when using such graphics in their application is about maintaining them. Consider the fact about the application icon (this is typically the graphic that is seen on the desktop, or in numerous other places where the name of the software is referenced). But, as you move from one version to another, you will need to have an application icon that is different from the icon used with the previous version. This helps you to mark that specific version of the software with a specific icon. So what do you do with the icon that you were using for the previous version ? You still need to save it somewhere since it was used in the previous version, and from time to time, people want to reference these icons and other imagery used within the product (once, we had a case where we were in version 7 of the product, and the management team wanted us to present the main graphics (including the application icon) that were being used in the previous 5 versions of the software; the idea was that there was a review team that was looking at a co-relation between the icon and the main focus of that previous release and whether these graphics were effective. It was hard to find the correct imagery, and the specialized team that had been preparing the graphics for us had suffered a lot of attrition over the years; they were unable to provide us the data that we needed. Finally, we had to do a lot of installation of previous versions, compare these with the versions stored in the source safe and then finally come up with the list.).
The idea of the previous story was about how it is much more difficult to maintain items that are different from code; since with code, the source safe will do a quick text comparison and make out the changes in code over a period of time. And mature large applications can have huge number of graphics embedded all over the software, and it is hard to find somebody in the team who will have the knowledge of which graphic was added at what period of time, and more important, the reason for why a specific graphic was added. And there are more complications that come into the picture. Consider that you are using a graphic in your software that was contributed by a team member and it was included in the software, and this happened over 4 years back. The graphic is still being used, and suddenly there is a legal challenge hit for the company over the rights of the graphic. At this time, you better have a good system of maintaining records to ensure that you can solve such a problem.
The next post will be a continuation of this series (Keeping track of stuff such as graphics in the software - Part 2).
However, for code, you would use some sort of code repository; but the same is not truly the same for non-code items such as buttons and other graphic options. Well, actually you can store such icons / visual items in the source safe but you will not be able to do operations such as comparisons between different versions of these items, and in fact, only when you actually export the history of such graphics from the source safe, will you be able to visualize what a previous version of the graphic items looks like.
One of the big challenges that software makers have when using such graphics in their application is about maintaining them. Consider the fact about the application icon (this is typically the graphic that is seen on the desktop, or in numerous other places where the name of the software is referenced). But, as you move from one version to another, you will need to have an application icon that is different from the icon used with the previous version. This helps you to mark that specific version of the software with a specific icon. So what do you do with the icon that you were using for the previous version ? You still need to save it somewhere since it was used in the previous version, and from time to time, people want to reference these icons and other imagery used within the product (once, we had a case where we were in version 7 of the product, and the management team wanted us to present the main graphics (including the application icon) that were being used in the previous 5 versions of the software; the idea was that there was a review team that was looking at a co-relation between the icon and the main focus of that previous release and whether these graphics were effective. It was hard to find the correct imagery, and the specialized team that had been preparing the graphics for us had suffered a lot of attrition over the years; they were unable to provide us the data that we needed. Finally, we had to do a lot of installation of previous versions, compare these with the versions stored in the source safe and then finally come up with the list.).
The idea of the previous story was about how it is much more difficult to maintain items that are different from code; since with code, the source safe will do a quick text comparison and make out the changes in code over a period of time. And mature large applications can have huge number of graphics embedded all over the software, and it is hard to find somebody in the team who will have the knowledge of which graphic was added at what period of time, and more important, the reason for why a specific graphic was added. And there are more complications that come into the picture. Consider that you are using a graphic in your software that was contributed by a team member and it was included in the software, and this happened over 4 years back. The graphic is still being used, and suddenly there is a legal challenge hit for the company over the rights of the graphic. At this time, you better have a good system of maintaining records to ensure that you can solve such a problem.
The next post will be a continuation of this series (Keeping track of stuff such as graphics in the software - Part 2).
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