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How can I make my development workflow more "enterprisey"?

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What is enterprise workflow?

Enterprise workflow management looks at the hundreds of processes involved that keep large organizations moving forward. Every department and team has certain standard processes to follow. Enterprise workflow management identifies the best ways to map, execute, integrate, improve, and automate workflows.


I'm the sole developer for an academic consortium headquartered at a university in the northeast. All of my development work involves internal tools, mostly in Java, so nothing that is released to the public. Right now, I feel like my development workflow is very "hobbyist" and is nothing like you would see at an experienced software development firm. I would be inclined to say that it doesn't really matter since I'm the only developer anyway, but it can't hurt to make some changes, if for no other reason than to make my job a little easier and get a few more technologies on my resume. Right now my workflow is something like this:

  • I do most of my development work in Eclipse on my laptop. Everything is saved locally on my laptop, and I don't use a VCS, nor do I really backup my code (except for occasionally emailing it to myself so I can see it on a different computer - yeah, I told you my development environment needs work).

  • When I'm done with a project and want to deploy it or if I just want to test it, I use the built-in Jar tool in Eclipse to make an executable .jar of my project. If I use external .jar libraries, I use the Fat-Jar plugin to include those .jars in my executable .jar.

  • After I create the .jar, I manually upload it to the server via SFTP and test it with something like java -jar MyProject.jar.

Oh yeah, did I mention that I don't unit test?

The most glaringly obvious problem that I'd like to fix first is my lack of source control. I like git because of it's distributed nature, but it doesn't seem to integrate with Eclipse well and I've heard that it doesn't work very well on Windows, which is my primary development OS. So, I'm leaning toward SVN, which I do have some experience with. I do have my own personal server, and I think I'll use that for my source control, because I'd rather be my own admin than have to deal with university bureaucracy. I had some trouble setting up SVN once before, but I'll give it another shot. Maybe I'll also install something like Trac or Redmine for bug-tracking, todo list, etc?

What about building and deployment? There has to be a better way than using Fat-Jar and manually uploading my jar to the server. I've heard about tools like Ant and Maven - do these apply to what I want to do? How can I get started using those?

I suppose I'd eventually like to integrate unit testing with JUnit too. Even though it probably should be, that is not my primary concern right now, because so far my applications aren't terribly complex. I'd really like to work on simplifying and streamlining my workflow right now, and then I'll ease into unit testing.

Sorry for the long question. I guess my question boils down to, for a sole developer, what tools and methodologies can/should I be using to not only make my job easier, but also just to expose myself to some technologies that would be expected requisite knowledge at a dedicated development house?


edit: Thanks for the great answers so far. I didn't mean to suggest that I wanted to make my workflow "enterprisey" just for the sake of doing it, but to make my job simpler and to get a few technologies under my belt that are typically used in enterprise development environments. That's all I meant by that.