Most of the organizations in today's world have some legacy software or systems. With pressures coming from outsourcing and cost-cutting, new applications are constantly being added to existing IT frameworks. In most cases, it is risky to completely replace the existing systems. As a result, most places have complex applications and systems frameworks. In order to achieve a successful coexistence of several applications on different platforms and technology architecture, teams are faced with some major questions, such as "Should we interoperate or integrate?"

By reworking lean principles for the branching and merging arena, we're able to create automated builds and unit tests to increase effectiveness and improve quality in software configuration management. Individual developers and teams alike can benefit from this process-improving strategy.

Sometimes you find yourself needing to insert a special character in a Makefile: perhaps you need a newline inside a $(error) message, or a space character in a $(subst) or a comma as the argument to a GNU Make function.  Those three simple things can be frustratingly hard in GNU Make; this article takes you through simple GNU Make syntax that removes the frustration.

One of the problems with Configuration Management (CM) and Project Management (PM) is that the tools and the data repositories for each are separate. As a result the processes are quite separate. The project manager takes a set of requirements and decomposes them into tasks, which are then prioritized, scheduled and assigned. The CM team creates configuration items and tries to tie the CIs back to the requirements so that they can be properly audited. When CM and PM work together they tend to enhance each others function, and eliminate potential overlap in the processes.