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The year ahead likely will be filled with unprecedented challenges in terms of both technology and business demands. While technology and business needs are certainly complex, the people and personality issues may be even more challenging to deal with. This article will get you started with tackling some of these people-related challenges that you will likely encounter in the coming year.

Build and deployment are two of the most essential functions that are performed by the configuration management guru. In some ways, they represent the beginning and the end of the release management life cycle. Bob Aiello describes how to develop an effective build and deployment solution complete with all of the other steps that are required as well.

Why is it that we keep revisiting configuration management “best practices”? It is not that they are not well covered. It is because they keep changing and every time we look at the process of development from a different perspective, we learn something new. Ben Weatherall found that what we do under the guise of CM differs in how we identify the problems to be solved, how we address those problems, and even what tools are appropriate.

A great way to establish your software engineering processes, training, best practices, reports, and metrics is to build a center of excellence (CoE). When complete, a CoE is a team, or entity, that provides the leadership and governance in a focus area.