configuration management

Release management is a complex function that involves many essential technical tasks that must be completed in a very specific way. At first glance, one might think that Release Management has little or nothing to do with personality and psychology. In the book Configuration Management Best Practices: Practical Methods that Work in the Real World, Bob Aiello and I focused three of our fourteen chapters on the people side of CM. The fact is that people skills play an essential role in release management. Read on if you want to improve your ability to get the job done and achieve success in release management!

Agile and ALM are two terms that you don’t often see side by side. To most developers, agile means team interaction, customer collaboration, dynamism, and responsiveness to change. In contrast, ALM seems to imply the opposite of agile, with echoes of rigid procedures, inflexibility, and top-down process control. But are the agile and ALM approaches as contradictory as they first appear to be?

Reading and reflecting upon lean and agile this month I realized that technology professionals do not realize how many of these practices are actually from the quality revolution that was led by luminaries including Shewart, Juran, Crosby and Deming. The Poppendiecks have certainly done a great job not only with sharing their lean practices, but also reminding us that process improvement has been successfully implemented in many settings long before it was applied to software development. Join me as we take a quick look back at where the journey to quality began!

With the advent of agile in the mainstream, it raises awareness of the challenges in getting software configuration management functionality established that suits the working processes of Agile methods. While not necessarily new to some software configuration management professionals, the primary challenge is how to adapt CM practices in a tangible way that supports Agile values while not discarding the CM values that ensure integrity of the product under development.