Flame it on me

The other day I was working for a company that hired me to upgrade their software factory to a Continuous Delivery setup. One of the questions of the developmentteams was to introduce Git as a replacement for SVN. Working for a fairly big organisation that is traditionaly formed I had to consult the Solution Architect. Solution Architects are people living in Ivory Towers who haven't written software for a long time or never made their hands dirty anyhow.

So I filed a request to setup some Git and Gitlab to let my development teams try it out and see if it would suit their needs. In the request we made clear what the advantages would and could be; including easier branching and better merging, and we thought we had a strong case.

Then we recieved the verdict and I quote: "It requires too much effort, and does not conform with our rules on branching, merging and versionmanagement. The transfer to Git doesn't support a clear goal. Branching and merging should be an exception instead of a rule".

[silence]

Where did these people live for the last eleven years, under a rock? Developers shouldn't branche? Merging is hard therefor we should not do it? No... merging is easy with Git therefor we shouldn't be afraid of it anymore. If you are afraid of something, do it more often. Branching is part of a good delivery strategy in build pipelines, which make you flexible. Too bad I'm not their manager, I would fire all architects that are not up to date with newest developments.

In the reply he also wanted to know how Git handles binaries in contrast to Subversion. OMG, realy? Binaries? Why? FFS? Yes, these files can be placed in Subversion or Git, but why would you do that? There are binary repositories that can handle these kinds of files way better than code repositories. Isn't that what we learned in kindergarten?

And as last argument he raises that it is already a problem to get non-functionals done within the teams. For one I'm doing the change, team impact is minor; they need to install git and pull. Second it seems that everyone always uses the non-functionals for exchange and to implement last. Non-functionals are most of the time acceptance criteria that can be automated, this should be implemented in the factory at the start of the project. Not used as change money.

Please let the solution architects find some solution to disolve in, I've had it with them.