build

Brad Appleton, Robert Cowham, and Steve Berczuk continue to explore the role of build and deployment in configuration management. While the details may change from year to year as technology evolves, the underlying principles remain the same. Regarding building, we are going to take the opportunity to provide a guide to some of our previous articles that still hold true.

Building your application is key to a successful, repeatable, development process. A reproducible build that works at all levels allows you to proceed with confidence and be more agile. Yet many organizations (agile and not) leave the build process to chance, even though all can benefit, regardless of their method.

Many times when managers first consider parallel development, it appears to be a very effective way to manage changes to concurrent streams of development. This is somewhat true if the project uses an SCM technology that allows for stable branching and establishes discreet project and maintenance branches. However, what is often forgotten is that while branching is a great way to separate code changes, at some point merging will have to occur. This article provides guidance for approaching and performing parallel development.