Software code audits can be arduous and time-consuming, as today’s software projects use a mix of proprietary, commercial, and open source software. This article outlines a number of methods to simplify and streamline your audit process and understand the best practices in organizing, documenting, labeling, tracking, and managing open source and third-party content brought into software portfolios.

Change control exists to review and approve important modifications, but done wrong, you chance confusion, chaos, failures, and outages. Poorly run change control wastes everyone’s time, but far worse is the missed opportunity to assess and manage risk. Here, Bob Aiello gets you up to speed on the lost art of change control.

Bernie Zelitch writes that his company’s build system scales well because early on, they scrutinized their build naming convention, saw its implications to the build ecosystem, and made radical changes. Their new naming convention takes some getting used to, but once it was fully adopted, it improved economy, flexibility, and functionality.

The rise of containers and microservices is creating widespread excitement in the DevOps world. But those alluring “simple, lightweight” tools don’t always scale so well. Delivering a business service comes with intrinsic complexity that doesn’t simply evaporate if only you use the right tools. Read on to learn why you should be wary of all the hype.