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Your Small Business Can't Afford to Not Invest in SCM It used to be that SCM was a complex and effort-intensive process that small projects and businesses could not affort to invest in. Tools were expensive, automation was a daunting task, and the imposition of process on the small development team would take away the small business advantage of moving quickly. Today, and certainly in the next generation of CM, quite the opposite is true. How can that be?
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"Agile" Means Disciplined SCM For many people, Agile software development congers up the thought of "undisciplined" software development. The reality is that using an Agile approach to its greatest benefit requires discipline in a variety of ways. None is more critical than the discipline of software configuration management. Agile teams are generally small, but their SCM needs are big.
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Can Configuration Management Defend You Against Information Asymmetry? Information Asymmetry is what happens when one party to a transaction has more relevant information than the other, and doesn't share it. Configuration management, done right, has the power to eliminate asymmetry, or at the very least - lessen its impact on projects.
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A Framework for Agile Bob Aiello discusses how CM and agile practices can go hand in hand - provided that you have a solid framework to work with. With agile's popularity seemingly always on the rise, alongside the need for CM, learn how having both benefits everyone onboard.
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Software Configuration Management Project Baselines A project baseline is the fundamental CM technique for release management. Configuration management has historically been about managing the acquisition of new products. To that end, a set of baselines is defined corresponding to various milestones in the product development cycle. These baselines reflect different expressions of the final product and include the functional, allocated, and released baselines.
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How Release Management Can Help Agile Teams As many have learned, using Agile methods can provide solid business benefits including earlier return on investment, earlier detection of failed efforts, and more satisfied stakeholders. However, when applying Agile methods to product-lines (and projects therein), often there are dependencies on other products (and their projects), services, and organizations that may run in a more waterfall or hierarchical manner. If the Agile project and product therein are self-sustaining with no dependencies on outside factors, life can be quite good. But most of the Agile projects I have worked with or visited have varying degrees of dependencies on other products or services that run in a more waterfall or hierarchical manner.
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The Practice of Good Release Management Processes in CM We build software as part of a system or as its own entire product. The goal is to meet the requirements established by the customer, the market and/or the cost/benefits analysis. Product releases are meant to move us from some starting point to our ultimate product over a period of time: months, years or even decades. Release management starts not with the delivery of software, but with the identification of what we're planning to put into the product. The timing and content of releases helps us to manage releases so that they are not too onerous on the customer and so that we stay in a competitive position with our products. Good release management processes will ensure that you know what is going to go into your product, what actually went into the product, and what changes the customer is going to realize upon upgrading.
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SCM Essentials for Small Teams Very small teams think that SCM (software configuration management) is not for them. Even the name sounds like a big thing: CM, configuration management. "Why should I care?" They say.
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Optimizing CruiseControl for Continuous Integration CruiseControl is a great tool for preventing against data loss and corruption. Michael Sayko explains in this article how this continuous integration tool can be implemented to assist development projects, even across the enterprise level.
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Bringing Business Value to IT Governance For some organizations, IT governance is just another set of standards that is stated yet with few (or no) compliance expectations, little actual verification occurring, few or no metrics to indicate compliance, and even less use of the results by senior management to run their organization. Without support for standards, including practices, policy, verification, metrics and management’s commitment to use the results to manage the organization, IT governance, like any other standard, will only be perceived as yet another item that has little management support and is lacking value in the organization.
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