The Latest

You may now be tired of hearing me say it, but I will say it again:  Your repository contains every version of everything which has ever been checked in to the repository.  This is a Good Thing.  We sleep better at night because we know that our efforts are always additive, never subtractive.  Nothing is ever lost.  As the team regularly checks in more stuff, the complete historical record is preserved, just in case we ever need it. But this feature is also a Bad Thing.  It turns out that keeping absolutely everything isn't all that useful if you can't find anything later. 

Unfortunately, GNU Make does not have any form of assertions built in, but they are easy to create using existing GNU Make functions.

My product is ready on CD. It's better than the previous release in respect to both quality and functionality perspectives. Does that mean it's ready to be released as a production product? How do I know when it's really ready?

We explore why it is important to understand the context of agile techniques when you are trying to build a more agile software configuration environment and how people can fool themselves into thinking that their non-agile environment has more control.

In the ever-growing complexity of dependencies amongst products at the build and run time level, there is the challenge of managing increasingly separate items that must work together upon release. This is where the concepts, disciplines, roles, and responsibilities of release management help. Release management focuses on both the engineering disciplines that must bring a specific project release together along with the management of external dependencies across products that must accompany a release.

Why a Configuration Management (CM) department should be independent from Development, Test, and Production. When deciding where to organize an SCM team within a development organization it is helpful to keep in mind that the three most important characteristics of the SCM role are objectivity, skill set, and focus. This document will show that an independent SCM department is the only group with the right mix of these characteristics to successfully implement and support a full range of SCM services.

This month's article is about a little GNU Make Gotcha: an easy way to get tripped up by two pieces of GNU Make syntax that do similar things, yet one has a deceptive name. ifndef isn't really ifndef at all, it would better if it were called ifempty, while ?= does make its decision based on whether the variable is defined or not.