How To Set Up A Dev-Environment For A Few Programmers?

Guys,

I’ve a question. I manage a team of few webdevelopers. Currently each of us has an own ftp + a subdomain pointed to this ftp. It’s working well but I feel it’s so slow (each webdeveloper has to upload a file after a change he has made, each user has to download a file when wants to edit them).

I used to use a virtual machine with a prepared enviroment. There was all what webdeveloper needed to work (apache, php, the database, source code of web-application). It was quite good but I am afraid that my team isn’t ready for this kind of solution yet.

What is your experience to manage a work of few developers. How do you combine a developer environment to them?

I use git and thanks to migrations, each dev can have an enviroment right on his PC.

Thanks for your reply. We also use GIT for our project (I think it’s a must have). How do you solve differences between a production environment and a dev-environemt? Do you have some script to check if a required libraries are accessable on a production enviroment? I mean scripts like you can see, for example in an open source installers (Zurmo etc.). Where do you keep data to test your business logic, is it in fixtures?

I don’t have any special setup apart from some ternary operators in the config checking for YII_DEBUG.