configuration management

In his CM: The Next Generation series, Joe Farah writes that software configuration management (SCM) can be a daunting venture for a small team. It seems that many solutions require a lot of effort and money, but this is not always the case. This article looks at what a small team really needs for CM.

Supporting cloud, mobile, and database development sounds like a remarkably technical endeavor. In practice, personality issues between team members can impact just how effectively you handle these complex technical efforts.

When folks started moving to agile development around the turn of the century, they first moved away from using certain automated tools. They did this mostly in order to get rid of project management tools and focus on face-to-face communications. This was a reasonable reaction to what had turned into a world of silos and automated workflow management. We developers were ridding ourselves of the mechanisms that produce all of that ceremony and reams of design documents. We would only use index cards and hand-drawn charts on a whiteboard. We didn’t want any tools to get in the way of the real work we were doing.

If you have recently transitioned to an agile team, you may have questions about the differences between user stories and use cases, especially how they differ from tradition requirements writing. In this article, Charles Suscheck defines each of these requirements types and uses a running example to illustrate how they differ in a real-world setting.