Maintaining consistency when working with large-scale projects
This is probably an off-topic question, but this is what I'm really interested in learning from other people with different backgrounds and experiences.
How do you keep track of your huge projects? Do you use subversion? EER models? Are you writing notes? All your faith lies in phpdoc? What structure do you use and what design pattern do you follow? There are many questions I know, and I don't expect you to answer ALL of them, just summarize what you want to highlight the most.
Personally, I use subversion for version control, phpdoc, jotting down personal notes for each model / controller, etc., and I almost always follow the MVC pattern.
Have a fantastic and automatic day !; -)
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I would recommend using the tools that are best for the people you have and the parts that are likely to be the most difficult to manage.
If you have a lot of requirements, use a tool that tracks requirements well.
If you have a lot of simple one-off projects, maybe simple project tracking works well.
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A great way to document your project (especially high-level stuff) is to have a wiki. The success of this obviously depends entirely on your teammates. If they hate writing prose, then the whole idea is basically doomed to begin with. But given the right people, it can really pay off. Multiple wiki pages with multiple diagrams can go a long way and are often more expressive than any UML diagram and whatever (of course a combination of both is even better :-) If you can get your testers and other people to join, you off to a good start. The more, the more fun.
One thing you forgot to mention in your post is the bug tracker. This is absolutely necessary, I'm sure Joel has some good advice on which is the best software selection out there;)
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You need bug tracking software to record how each issue was resolved and link it to your Subversion repository so you can see the issue that caused the registration and vice versa. We use Fogbugz ourselves .
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