In the past year or so I’ve been playing the role of technical lead / architect on most of the Flex projects I’ve been working on. Usually this involves a team of 3-6 developers and 1-3 designers. The focus of my blog over the next few months will be to pass on the tips and tricks that I’ve learned as a lead developer working with other developers and designers, the bosses as well; PMs, technical managers, QA managers, customers… et al.

To get started a few tips:

Use source control

At EffectiveUI we typically use SVN repositories, but choosing the right technology isn’t really as important as making the choice to use source control. Also, make sure your source control servers are redundant, or someday you might wish you had.

Create an easy designer developer workflow

In the world of RIAs the ability to stay agile within a life cycle of a project hinges on this point. If getting from design to an implementation of that design is anything less than nimble, you’ll feel some pain.

Patterns, paradigms, and frameworks… oh my

Select and use a micro-architecture that makes sense for your dev group and/or application. Cairngorm is one of the more popular micro-architectures used in Flex development, it’s what we use at EUI.

The benefit and problem with most Flex micro-architectures is: keeping the framework light weight and simple also means that (while providing flexibility) they do not provide enforceability. In some areas this is, arguably, a good thing and in others it’s not so good.

Needless to say, most of my posts will focus on Cairngorm and how we have used and tweaked it to create a good software design as well as an agile development environment.

Stay tuned for more….
-adam