How can multiple developers efficiently work on one force.com application?

Question

The company I work for is building a managed force.com application as an integration with the service we provide.

We are having issues working concurrently on the same set of files due to the shoddy tooling that is provided with the force.com Eclipse plugin. If 2 developers are working on the same file, one is given a message that he can't save -- once he merges he has to manually force the plugin to push his changes to the server along with clicking 2 'Are you really sure' messages.

Basically, the tooling does a shoddy job of merging in changes and forces minutes of work every time the developer wants to save if another person has modified the file he's working on.

We're currently working around this by basically 'locking' individual files by letting co-workers know who is editing a file.

It feels like there has got to be a better way in this day and age. Does anyone know of a different toolset we could use, process we could change, or anything we can do to make this easier?

Answer 1

Many developers can work on one Sandbox each which will actually cause no issue until they start working on different elements and there is a lot of overlapping between the elements.

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But, this issue generally happens only when two or more developers are working on the issue which has inter-related dependancy. 

So, you can avoid this by working on separate Sandboxes.

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