The following section describes one way to share external projects. Although there are many ways in which to share external projects, the following is how Rational Synergy developers do this.
External projects save time for developers because a developer does not need to copy and update the projects that he does not change. External projects also help to promote modular code and information hiding, both considered best practices for software development.
However, the build manager must do some extra work to manage external projects, including restructuring projects, updating makefiles, and updating build scripts that automate the build process. Also, developers who work on both the lower-level project (e.g., the library) and the project that depends on it (e.g., the executable) must manage their own working versions of the external project and both source projects.
If you want to use external projects, read the following sections: