Advantages of a Multitiered Hierarchy

The amount of time required for a developer to put her work back to the integration workspace can be sharply reduced by interposing a tier of subintegration workspaces between the integration and development level workspaces.

Whenever a developer puts back work to an integration workspace, there is some chance that the next developer to do a Putback transaction will not be able to put back their changes until they bring over the earlier changes, rebuild the modules, and test the new changes with their own--the more Putbacks that occur the higher the potential for conflict.

When many developers work on a project, the Bringover, rebuild, test cycle can become onerous and time consuming. If smaller groups of developers working on related portions of code integrate into a subintegration workspace, that workspace will be more stable and require fewer builds and less testing. Of course when the subintegration workspaces are themselves put back to their common integration area, changes made in the other development workspaces will have to be integrated. Experience has shown, however, that doing larger integrations, less frequently, is more efficient.