The Latest

Change control is a configuration management process used to manage changes to important baselines like requirements and production. Change control may be considered a critical practice in that it often can be used to manage critical items within a project lifecycle, an application lifecycle, or the organization. It can be challenging to implement change control effectively. Often the reason why is because there is an anti-pattern (poor unworkable solution) in place.

What's Best? What are industry best practices for Software Configuration Management (SCM)? Which best practices are best for your project and for your organization? How should these best practices be applied or implemented to solve your SCM problem domain? Is your project or organization prepared to use SCM best practices? Let's examine a collection of SCM best practices.

‘It is easy to get success but the challenge is to stay on with it,' the commonly referred quote for personal development, when seen from a business perspective it explains the need for holding on to successes in business and thereon driving growth . In other words it calls for standardization and a smooth flow of activities for running the business.

Quite often software configuration management is backed against the wall because following the process is going to cause someone a delay, or worse yet, inconvenience. Using a bit of bit humor, we’ll look at some common complaints and the underlying reasons why we put the rules in effect in the first place.

We thought 2005 was a pretty gosh darn great year for Agile Software Development and Software Configuration Management alike. We wanted to share what we feel are some of the timeless classics that we have most looked to throughout the year, as well as the new books in the last year that we have been most impressed with.

Raising the BarIT organizations are looking for new levels of productivity.  In an era of relative talent shortages, the ability to seize business opportunities depends on making dramatic increases in productivity.  At the same time, the government has raised the bar substantially with governance mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley.  Add to this globalization, outsourcing and distributed work forces that have the effect making even smaller companies manage teams over geographic and time zones.  However, the coming whammy is the dramatic loss of talent looming up as baby-boomers retire.

All of us can think of examples of bad processes. They seem to be indelibly burned into our memories, but it may be hard to think of what a high-quality process looks like, because it feels like we've never seen one. Of course, that's not really true. All of us have experienced good processes; they are the ones that were invisible! Processes that are helpful, efficient and effective also seem to disappear into the background. Unless something draws our attention to them, we may not notice them at all!