Choosing toolchains and tools

I think tooling should help you with your work and facilitate what you do. As much as possible, it should get out of the way and not dictate how you do what you do. In reality, this isn’t always the case, as tooling has certain opinions, and you often choose it because you like (most of) those opinions. If you’re starting from scratch with a toolchain choice or are planning to switch, how do you decide which approach to follow or which tools to use as part of that approach?

The key factors to consider in any tools section process are as follows:

• What is your current team’s experience? What are they comfortable using, what have they used before, and what do they want to use?
• How standard is what you’re considering? This relates closely to the last point, but it’s important to consider what happens when a team changes. If you use something less common or specialized, it could be hard to replace team members...