Configuration Management Primer For Hiring Managers: Two Different Jobs Confused By The Same Title Your software development and support teams come to you one day and say they need a configuration management person to manage infrastructure configuration and releases. But wait a minute - doesn't the software development team already have a configuration management person? And what was it again that she was hired to do? Oh yeah, software builds. So why are your teams trying to give this position a configuration management title too? What really is configuration management? |
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Determine How a Vendor's Tool Will Support Your Project CM Plan I've seen countless sets of requirements and RFIs come my way for acquiring new CM/ALM tools. However, it is a very rare occasion when I see a company actually publish (and send out) the project CM Plan to potential tool vendors. In my most recent encounter of this approach, the pitch was: How would you change this plan based on your CM/ALM solution for us? This project has it right—not just a set of requirements, but an actual CM Plan, and not so much, "What does your tool do?" as, "What will our CM Plan look like with your solution?" |
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CM Planning in Turbulent Times In Turbulent economic times such as the recent days, it is reasonable to assume that while some things will be reduced or cut, (e.g. human resources and budgets), others (e.g. documentation) will be maintained or even increased. So, what can we do to create effective and accurate CM Plans? In this article I'd like to show some essential points for effective CM planning, which can offer a solution of reducing costs, based on the IEEE 828 standards. Basically, the goal is to reduce quantity but not quality. |
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God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen As a piece of Christmas cheer we bring you a traditional olde English carol. It is believed that this particular carol was sung to programmers by configuration managers to earn additional money during the Christmas season. The lyrics (including mention of Mil-STD-973 and CMM among other themes) are reputed to date back to the 15th century although the author is unknown. We have been lucky enough to track down a recording of this traditional carol—click the start button. |
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Reusability vs. Usability: Where to Draw the Line? Arbitrary reuse of code components could deteriorate overall usability. In this column, Linda Hayes explains the good and bad qualities of reusability and five factors one should keep in mind when managing reusability to get the most of it. |
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Transitioning from Analysis to Design The step between specifying requirements to working on a system design can be tricky. Fortunately, the basis on which the step is made can be calculated. Paul Reed thoroughly explains how the transition should progress and offers some instructions on how to move properly through this phase. |
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GIT For Basics Editor's Note: Recently, I asked my colleague, Dilip, to give me an article describing his own experience learning a CM tool that I was not familar with myself. The best part of writing for CM Crossroads is that we get reports from people who actually know and understand how these products work in the real world. Please take a look at Dilip's excellent article and get ready to share your best practices and experience next! |
Dilip Mahadevappa
December 2, 2008 |
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Using Working Folders in Version Control The repository is the official archive of a project's work products. We treat our repository with great respect. In contrast, developer often treat their working folder with very little regard. It exists for the purpose of being abused. The working folder starts out worthless, nothing more than a copy of the repository. If it is destroyed, we have lost nothing, so we run risky experiments which endanger its life. In this excerpt from his online book, "Source Control HOWTO," Eric Sink describes explores common "best practices" for using working folders. |
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Tracing rule execution in GNU Make Who hasn't wondered what exactly Make's log file output means. This article is about Makefile tracing. I cover tracing the execution of Makefile rules. |
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Tool Choice as a Quality Issue We need to choose an SCM tool. It will mean some work to make the choice and then more work to put it into practice. At least we don’t have to worry about it from a quality perspective, though. After all, the tools we choose to employ don’t affect the quality of the software we produce. Do they? Well, let’s think about this a bit. Hmmmmmm…
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Alan S. Koch
November 18, 2008 |
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