The Future of Agile Configuration Management: 2006 and Beyond We have been indulging in a mixture of wishful thinking and crystal ball gazing to consider what the future holds for Agile CM. To misquote Malvolio, "Some things are born great, some things achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." Rather than try to make grand predictions for 5 or 10 years down the road, we're mostly limiting ourselves to the next 1-3 years (except where noted of course). |
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CM Generations and a Vision for the Future It was 1978 when I first introduced change packages (a.k.a. updates) as the central feature of an in-house CM system. It's still in use today supporting a 40 million LOC project. It was 1982 when I introduced the concept of streams to rationalize branching along the product roadmap. Little did I know that a quarter century later, these concepts would just be starting to move to the forefront. |
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The Illusion of Control in Software Configuration Management 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. |
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Metrics and Process Maturity In keeping with the season, I'll try to keep this month's article on the Light side (both Chanukah and Christmas are Festivals of Light). Not easy to do when talking about metrics. If you're serious about attaining SEI CMM Level 5 certification, or about improving your processes in an effective manner, metrics are critical. Changing processes based on gut feel, or even based on some other organization's best practices can lead you backwards. Metrics not only permit you to detect this, but give you the basic data you need to improve your processes. |
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Making Incremental Integration Work for You Recent CM Crossroads posts have suggested that a branch-per-change branching strategy is good because it gives you the ability to maintain a stable "main" trunk, while integrating a change at a time if you want. As Joseph Reedick put it in one of his responses: |
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How to Implement Continuous Integration The term “continuous integration” is getting a bit of attention these days. It refers to the process of integrating often (or immediately) to reduce integration effort, complexity, and pain.It allows for others make changes more readily. While the term “continuous” is catchy, it is not accurate in what the concept implies. In context to integration, it implies a process without interruption. |
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The Agile Difference for SCM The authors describe what they believe are the root causes of key differences between agile and traditional development and how they change certain assumptions SCM has about software development. |
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Changes: The Crossroads Between Project CM and Product CM Project perspective or product perspective - what's the best way to look at configuration management. Well... both. We'll journey through both sides, giving this author's perspective of each, and showing how changes form the crossroads between project CM and product CM. Right off the bat, we'll need to agree on some definitions. |
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The Road To Production Quality 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? |
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Application, Project, and Organizational Configuration Management To get to our destination, the road that we take is important. In order to navigate, the road must be built for our needs. In order to keep it safe, signs with meaningful messages must be added along the way. This should parallel our approach to configuration management (CM). The road in this CM example is the CM infrastructure: a combination of the CM environment (CM technology and systems) and the CM procedures. This car vehicle is the project which uses CM road to deliver a release to its destination. The signs on the road are the organizational policies and direction given to guide us in the right direction and on the right road. |
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