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When working on projects its helpful to know in which direction you are headed.  Its good to place goals, do a bit of planning, and get things right to save time in the future.  Unfortunately however, there is little to no information online on how to successfully manage and keep a big software project going.  Sure there are management books on how to motivate people, or how to lead coworkers, or even how to plan every step of the project with careful diagrams, flow charts, and process graphs.  As far as I could find a year ago there was nothing on how to get down and dirty and manage things like a build process, or an automatic unit test suite, or how to deal with different platforms in your build system.  For the past year I have been working on a big project that required all these things and whenever I fell into a trap, or discovered a new idea, or came up with a new operation I wrote down little snip-its to be eventually published in this article.  I hope others looking for information on how to manage a project effectively and efficiently will find some of these ideas very helpful.

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