Many startup companies are in the area of software development. Although a large number of these companies have their origins in the garage, the starters always have an aspiration of what the ideal workspace will be like. What will the ideal professional software environment encompass?

Startups of different stripes do grow to see the light of day with regards to their dreams and aspirations. Many owners of startup companies scramble to build an ideal professional work environment in which new employees will assume work as the company grows to achieve its fortunes. Below is a description of some elements of an ideal work space that these startups should be looking at. In other terms, this is what the ideal workspace should be.

 

Office Building: Located in a quiet neighborhood, the office building needs to be surrounded with nature with plenty of parking space. The space will be used to accommodate potential clients during campus meetings and also provide ample and affordable parking space for the companies employees.

 

Office: The offices for each developer need to be well lit, usually next to a window facing a clean lake. Private spaces in place of cubicles offer developers the space that they need to stir up the matter in their heads to produce products that will allow the company to compete in its market. Other entertainment facilities in the building not too far off from the office will also be desirable. In moments of thought, most developers like to lose themselves in a task not so related to the problem at hand. It is during this times that ingenious solutions creep into the minds of developers.

 

Desk: The workspace of each developer needs to be clean. Large high resolution dual monitors with a desktop work station offer enough computing power and ample space to open up applications that a typical developer would. The integrated development environment, browser, a debug terminal, email client, chat client etc.

 

Workstation: Coupled with the dual monitors mentioned above, the state of the art workstation is what is recommended for each developer office. Developers need as much computing power as they can get their hands on. Not only does this improve their work, sufficient computing power lowers the build cycles for the applications under development and allows each developer to set up a complete environment independent of any remote connections to other content repositories. Depending on the type of work performed, developers might also need powerful laptops to help them complete tasks off the clock while at home meditating on solutions that boggle their minds.

 

Mobile Devices: An essential asset for each developer is a mobile device that is able to keep track of their schedules and tasks. Say a developer has two consecutive meetings, instead of dashing back to the office to find the room number where the next meeting is to be held, the developer will pull out the mobile device where he or she can check meeting times and proceed to the next room when the first meeting is complete. Other developers will also need mobile devices to test applications developed for mobile devices. In the current age of mobility, developing of mobile applications is one of the great businesses to be in.

 

Test Lab: Where there are multiple developers, testing of common application is a required practice. A test lab to test applications from the user interface to its functionality is an essential element for the success of any development group. To help lower the costs of maintaining a variety of system distributions, a set up of a couple physical machines running virtual machines on which the environments for the product being developed are simulated is a recommended. Quality products demand many tests and many regressions tests. It is assumed that tests will always be running in the lab and sending continuous feedback to the developers.

 

Repository: Developers are not to be trusted with code sitting on their workstations. Repositories offer a common storage area where code can be shared and contributed to by developers in the office. There are repository solutions ranging from free to commercial ones.

 

Automated Builds: Stability of the organizations products and its quality can be determined by how quickly a new build can be shipped. Automating the building process of a shipment not only lowers the build costs but also offers an advantage to the organization with its increased product turn around. Automated builds also guarantee that there is a build at any given time that can be shipped to customers.

 

Servers: A common back up location is important for any company. Having a server where everyone shares a drive that is backed up is a good idea. Besides backup servers, test servers , mail servers, DNS servers and other servers necessary to serve the business needs will be necessary. Servers will be located in the server room that is not accessible to everyone.