Version Control

Agile and ALM are two terms that you don’t often see side by side. To most developers, agile means team interaction, customer collaboration, dynamism, and responsiveness to change. In contrast, ALM seems to imply the opposite of agile, with echoes of rigid procedures, inflexibility, and top-down process control. But are the agile and ALM approaches as contradictory as they first appear to be?

Reading and reflecting upon lean and agile this month I realized that technology professionals do not realize how many of these practices are actually from the quality revolution that was led by luminaries including Shewart, Juran, Crosby and Deming. The Poppendiecks have certainly done a great job not only with sharing their lean practices, but also reminding us that process improvement has been successfully implemented in many settings long before it was applied to software development. Join me as we take a quick look back at where the journey to quality began!

With the advent of agile in the mainstream, it raises awareness of the challenges in getting software configuration management functionality established that suits the working processes of Agile methods. While not necessarily new to some software configuration management professionals, the primary challenge is how to adapt CM practices in a tangible way that supports Agile values while not discarding the CM values that ensure integrity of the product under development.

In his CM: The Next Generation Series, Joe Farah writes that one of the biggest problems with software configuration management (SCM) standards is that the industry is currently too fragmented. Sure, there are many ways to do things and plenty of high-level standards out there, but as a whole, the industry uses different terminology for the most basic concepts and fails to understand that standards must go beyond ability and push the industry forward.