configuration management

Articles

Agile SCM – Build Management for an Agile Team

A number of people work together to develop a software application. The application is useful only when the components each person works on come together: the process of integration. The mechanics of integration happens during a build. Last month we discussed continuous integration. Integration implies building and this month we'll talk about the various kinds of builds one does during a development process.

Merging Defect Fixes into the Development Codeline

No matter what type of software you develop, from internal IT applications to web applications to commercial software packages, fixing bugs following a release is part of the software development lifecycle. Realistically, software maintenance can be a project by itself. However, the process of merging production fixes into the development codeline is an equally significant effort. Unfortunately, the effort required to merge production fixes into the development codeline can be grossly underestimated and improperly staffed even by organizations that practice otherwise good software development.

Michael Sayko
A Practical Approach for Selecting and Adopting an SCM Tool

Wanted: A software configuration management (SCM) tool that (a) provides the capabilities necessary to support an organization's software development process, (b) integrates seamlessly with the Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), (c) facilitates the organization's change management process, (d) facilitates the organization's build process, (e) requires only modest training for technical staff , and (f) encourages proper and effective use by technical staff.

Michael Sayko
Learn from your Vendor: Solution Selling

If your daughter ever comes home with a friendly, outgoing guy named Norbert, shoot first and ask questions later.

 

Some years ago, a salesman named Norbert at the SCM vendor where I worked got a call in late December from a prospect that had decided to buy from a different vendor. He asked to keep an appointment he had made for a wrapping up session. He went to the meeting with a sales proposal in hand, and after reengineering the vision of the customer, actually left with a sales agreement. Now that's a short sales cycle! 

Austin Hastings
Strategic Weakness: SCM Implementation Risks

The best way to make a project succeed is to communicate effectively. When all levels of the project share the goals, vision, constraints, and plan, everyone on the team can pull as hard and as creatively as possible in the right direction. Failing to share the goals and vision underlying a software configuration management (SCM) implementation can cause it to fail.

Austin Hastings
Continuous Staging: Scaling Continuous Integration to Multiple Component Teams

This month we will discuss some of the difficulties encountered when attempting continuous integration for multiple component teams working together to develop a large system. We describe the concept of a staging area to help coordinate the teams and stabilize the interdependencies between built versions of components.

Best Practices of Agile SCM

There is a good amount of training, discussion and many articles concerning software configuration management (SCM) standards that tell us to implement configuration identification, status accounting, routine auditing, etc. All of this information is good and very important because it helps us understand the overall objectives. Rarely, though, do you find real tangible approaches for "how" to actually implement solutions that accomplish the objectives. This article will discuss a typical SCM Implementation engagement focusing on some practical best practices in order to achieve the objectives of the many CM standards out there. These best practices won't apply to all situations.

Golden Patterns and Symmetries in Concurrent Development

Patterns have provided a means of capturing recurring themes in software development and have been successful utilized to describe a number of software configuration management (SCM) practices [1, 2]. This article explores a higher-order pattern in concurrent development - more subtle and potentially powerful because of its applicability at a number of different levels of granularity.

Louis Taborda
Software Configuration Management Patterns

Patterns and pattern languages are tools that can be used to help a team be more effective and agile. They can lead to robust, effective solutions, because the solutions that patterns can lead you to take the environment into account. They also solve problems in a way that makes the system work better. This article will show you how you can use existing patterns to improve your SCM process. It will also help you to understand where existing patterns and pattern languages have gaps.

Variation Management in Software Product Lines

Configuration management for a software product line is a multi-dimensional problem. In addition to the conventional configuration management problem of managing software variation over time, software product lines introduce the additional problem of managing variation among the different products within the application domain space of the product line. Thus we have a configuration management problem in both time and space.

Charles Krueger

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