I’m considering options for development environments for webMethods and whether I should just keep one hosted development IS that all developers connect to, or invest in local IS instances (and better computers) for each developer. It is only a small development (7-10 people at any onetime). Any advice greatly appreciated, particularly from anyone who has tried both option.

Well having different IS for all developers is certainly the best in terms of most productive considering each developer has necessary hardware configuration to fullfill the request… a little costly affair :P, but that’s not ideal scenerio unless if each developer is working on “real” modular piece of code which doesn’t interact with some other piece developed by other developer or some common framework services etc.
It would be a overhead in managing all the IS’s in case of common framework services for changes made in there… every developer IS has be sync and if not then there is always a risk of later on breaking the code/project.

I would recommend to have central IS with proper hardware sizing and all developer calling to this machine with version control system in place, in this way the maintainence overhead will be minimized and changes at a central location will eliminate the risk of developer having their own version of code.

I would suggest the second option… " central IS with proper hardware sizing… "

–Shaik

“I would recommend to have central IS with proper hardware sizing and all developer calling to this machine with version control system in place” → Yes this would be the common/standard practice esp where Shared Services/team of development involves and minimal overhead.

HTH,
RMG

The typical configuration I see is a shared development server to which developer’s connect.

I have also seen a distributed configuration work well where each developer has their own IS instance and when they complete a component/project they promote to a shared dev testing environment.

Each developer is responsible for managing/configuring their IS instance. In this set up, good version control is even more important to success, IMO.