Best practice for a small team to work on a Qt Quick project?

jeanmilost

I'm working in a small team which is about to migrate from a previous development environment to Qt Quick. We also pretend to use Visual Studio for the development.

With our previous IDE we had several habits, work processes and development tools which allowed each actor to work on a particular aspect of the project, without disrupt the work of the other actors, in particular we had an effective working protocol between each group of competence (the designers, the developers, ...).

I recently searched for common protocols and tools the Qt Quick developers are using to allow harmoniously each actor to work on the part of a project that concerns him. The best I found until now is Qt Design Studio, which allows designers to create and test a full interface without having to code it, and which may then be sent to the developers. However there are some aspects that I didn't like, among others a kind of rigidity when an interface should be modified after several creation cycles, and the interaction with Visual Studio.

I would be happy if several Qt Quick developers were willing to share their experiences with the software they develop, what tools they use, and how they interact with the different development actors, i.e. graphic designers, testers, marketing , ...

In other words, what are the best practices to apply to a small team to develop an application with Qt Quick?

sierdzio

I won't say it's the best approach, but something that works is: designers prepare designs as images, export assets (icons, colours, fonts etc.). Then Qt developers write QML code which reflects the design. Then design team reviews the result and makes sure the UI looks as it should. Clear separation, designers use whatever tools they like, and Qt devs use Qt Creator (usually).

jeanmilost

@sierdzio thank you for sharing your experience.

An important point for our development team is to allow the designers to write a part of the qml code, at least to basically create the interface as they want, or to be able to modify a part of the interface during the development cycle without having to resort to developers. I must clarify that they have the skills to achieve that.

We also have the possibility to reload any modified qml file on runtime from inside our apps, so the modifications may be shown directly into the running application.

So, what I'm searching for is a framework or IDE which would allow to write qml code in the most possible independent way. Until now the closest tools I found were Qt Creator and Qt Design Studio, but Qt Creator is problematic when the qml code links to custom c++ widgets or references (especially when the code is created with Visual Studio), whereas Qt Design Studio allows to create a pure qml interface, but needs to be converted before using it in a real c++ project.

2 questions interest me:

Are there any other tools than the 2 mentioned above to generate qml content?
How other development teams manage the change cycles between the design teams and the programming teams?