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Wrangling a Release: The Role of Release Manager Companies that develop multiple products often struggle with how to ensure they all work together as a solution and struggle with how to get the deliverables from various products together into a working release. Project managers and product managers have other priorities to handle. So who handles a release that wrangles together multiple project deliverables from multiple products that define a solution or complex release? The answer is the Release Manager.
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Don't Relegate Release Management to a Product's Release Joe Farah writes that there are two key requirements: release management has to start prior to development and the tools and processes available for release management are equally applicable and important for everyone on the product team, not just for the release team.
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People Skills Play an Essential Role in Release 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!
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The Advantages of a Pipelined Approach for Build and Deployment Automation Automation is required to build and deploy software applications consistently. Automation is necessary to build and deploy software applications rapidly. While build and deployment automation is essential for modern software development, not all approaches to automation produce the same results.
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Agile ALM—Opposites Attract 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?
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9 Questions You Must Ask When Selecting the Right Tool and Vendor The key to selecting the best vendor and tool is asking the right questions. The answers to these nine essential questions can mean the difference between satisfaction with your purchase and a giant waste of time and money.
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Lean and Agile Practices Have Their Roots in the Quality Revolution 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!
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Why Agile Development Requires Agile Configuration Management In his CM: The Next Generation Series, Joe Farah writes that anyone who thinks that agile development implies minimal CM is probably in the situation of not having to deal with customers. Instead, agile development requires agile CM; configuration management tuned to the agile development shop and philosophy.
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Adapting the Agile Mindset to Software Configuration Management 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.
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A Framework to Establish People-related Best Practices Usually I write about the impact of personality in process improvement. This month’s topic of standards and frameworks suggested that I discuss the impact of the SEI’s People Capability Maturity Model on issues related to managing your most important resources—people. Unfortunately, many organizations have failed to realize that managing and developing the right team is far more important than just the products and services that generate revenues. If you forget about your human resources, then you probably won’t be in business for very long. That said, many otherwise successful technology professionals find it difficult to successfully manage human resources. This article describes an excellent framework developed by the SEI to help you establish effective people-related best practices.
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