Workflow: defining, designing and building a programming process and version control system. Part I – history and background

Abstract There are a number of papers discussing the need for version control in the development of programs in the pharmaceutical industry. From simple CVS or RCS command line interfaces to the more complex and graphical tools like Rational Rose, programmers are told: there is a system out there to version your software, so do it! This is an important step in software development, but it is not the ‘be all end all’ for programmers. Since the industry insists on a review (Quality Control or ‘QC’) step to ensure that the specifications of the statisticians are met by the code of the programmers, it makes sense to have that same system allow for the ‘flow’ of validated code from the programmer to the statistician to the production version of the code. This paper discusses the process that was originally used until the company purchased a version control system in 2001– a paper-based system – and the evolution of our workflow from this paper-based system, through a commercial application and into an internal...