The Latest

What’s the ultimate goal of every software development project? Unless you just inherited a fat sum of dough from your late Uncle Milton, it’s probably to make money. The faster you can turn your project into a quality product in the marketplace, the more money you will make. Using a Software Configuration Management (SCM) tool will help you achieve that goal, and integrating that tool with other development tools can help get you there even faster.

Do you need to improve an area of your team's performance? Measure it and post the results. Over time you will see the performance improve. If you want to improve the quality of your product, measure it. Over time you will see the quality improve. Testing is the key to measuring quality, and CM is an equal partner. A good CM partner will provide both the communication capabilities and the information base to enable the relationships needed for a quality marriage.

It was a restaurant my wife and I had passed many times, and we had always told each other, "We must try them some day." When we finally tried them, we were pleasantly surprised. The food, the service, the atmosphere, even the price were great! "This will be a regular stop for us," we agreed. But on our third visit, we had to send our food back twice. Another time, we waited nearly an hour for our order. Then, some time later, we were seated at a table that was not clean. Most of the time, things were great. But as we experienced sporadic problems, we visited that place less and less often.

Traceability! Some crave it. others cringe at the very mention of it. For hardcore configuration managers and requirements and systems engineers, it is a fundamental commandment of “responsible” software development. For many hardcore agilists and other developers, the very word evokes a strong “gag” reflex, along with feelings of pain and frustration. Traceability requires work and discipline! So how does traceability add value to our business and how can we make it easier?

Taking a team from an undisciplined product development strategy, through an organized process with visible tracks, to a mostly automated, self-improving process is a long journey. It requires a good understanding of change, an adequate SCM tool or tool suite, good people for sure, and a lot of common sense. The journey is well worth the effort, though. I've been down the road more than once. It leads you to the path where you can manage properly and let the configuration management be handled automatically.

Since the establishment of software configuration management (SCM) as a formal engineering discipline, the written SCM plan has been accepted as an essential document for software development organizations. SCM engineers regard the plan as a description of the CM process and an enumeration of the CM procedures to be used on a project or program. Writing an SCM plan is often viewed as the first step in establishing the CM process for a new software development effort.

This article focuses on branching and merging. We present some background for branching and merging, and consider some of the implications for agile development in particular. We also hope to reduce some of the suspicion that many agile developers have of branching. The article assumes some overall branching knowledge and yet revisits some particular details that often seem to confuse people. This is a fertile area which we will continue to expand on in future articles.