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Whereas Project Management (PM) is a widely accepted, highly visible discipline, Configuration Management (CM) is too often seen as a low-level, technical discipline - a back-room activity that, while essential, does not command management attention.

In last month's column, "Reducing Your Cost of Quality," I listed "structured personal reviews" as being a highly effective appraisal method.  This resulted in e-mails from multiple people asking me about that topic.  So this month, I will explain what I mean by this term, and explain how you can make your reviews effective.

What does it take to produce a high-quality product? A clear understanding of the customers' needs? Of course! Solid engineering work? Yes! Intensive testing? Naturally! Consistent practices? You bet! A committed, cohesive team? Without a doubt! Anything else?

Ineffective operating system level security can jeopardize your entire SCM operations and the hundreds of millions of dollars of software assets you are trying to control. It is important to match SCM to your company’s security model and use OS security to exercise control over application runtime environments, which CCM tools typically do not control. Here are some important guidelines for using operating system security to provide robust SCM for Windows and *NIX platforms.

Continuous integration is an automatic re-building of project code base that is triggered by new changes to ensure that new changes integrate well into the existing code base. Continuous integration gains popularity among software organizations for its ability to provide quick feedback on quality of new changes. This feedback is used to deliver timely fixes if the changes don’t integrate well and break the project code base.

Hey CM’ers!  Welcome to another fun filled, fact free edition of From the Trenches, the column where we get down in the mud to talk about the basics of Configuration Management and try to avoid any incoming shells.  This month we will talk about Software Configuration Management Plans (SCMP’s).  What are they?  Why do you need one?  How do you write one?  How can you delegate this task to someone else, anyone else?

It seems so obvious that we should develop systems based on requirements, and yet it turns out to be rather hard to do and thus many organizations are doing it very badly. From a software configuration management standpoint, we could perhaps leave the whole process of requirements engineering to one side and focus on the management of requirements and thus the aspects of change control and traceability. That would perhaps be unduly ducking the issue, and, of course, we can’t resist giving an opinion anyway!