tools

When the number of employees, products, and releases you’re managing grows rapidly, that transformation introduces several challenges—and opportunities—in almost every aspect of configuration management. This article presents the major issues a company may face and the improvements you can make to processes and tools as a result.

Developers are distracted from coding by the need to interact with version control systems. Automation of branching, merging, and notifications allows developers to focus on coding. However, integration between the VCS and issue-tracking system, and preferably a continuous integration tool, is necessary to accomplish this goal.

In modern software development, changes to the code base of a project occur quickly as a result of high levels of end-user feedback and shifting needs. Agile has become an increasingly important software development lifecycle management methodology, and using automation to manage a code repository allows continuous integration to take center stage without imposing costs due to human error.

Testing professionals who are learning about agile often want to know how they can provide traceability among automated tests, features, and bugs and report on their testing progress. Here, Lisa Crispin gives an example of how her previous team worked together to integrate testing with coding and helped everyone see testing progress at a glance.