Version Control

Release management is very similar to a team sport that involves many essential interactions. Very often teams find it particularly challenging to work together effectively, and the end result is that they cannot manage to complete any complex tasks without making many mistakes. Sports teams are also affected by interpersonal dynamics that can either help build the team or render it completely dysfunctional. Release management involves the packaging of every component in order to successfully deliver a complete product to a customer. Your release management function needs to efficiently coordinate the work of each player on your team.

Build is central to CM and iit's critical to do it right. A basic build capability is founded on two key fundamentals: the ability to reproduce the build and the ability to automate the build process. Without these fundamentals, you're fighting an uphill battle. Reproduction of the build implies that you have a CM system able to capture the build definition. Automation helps to ensure that no manual errors can play into the production, but this is just a basic build capability.

While it may seem that slowing things down is undesirable, such approaches often work very well and produce a higher throughput than the original (seemingly more active and energetic, if perhaps rather more frenetic) process. The downside of these experiences is that they make it easy to confuse manage with control, and even easier to interpret control as inhibit.

Tools selection should really be the most objective and straightforward task that any technology professional could be asked to work on. After all, selecting a hammer is a basic task that depends on objective criteria such as the size of the nail that you are pounding into a wall. In technology, tools selection involves a lot more group dynamics than you might expect, and it is very possible that personality issues within the team evaluating the tools could cause you to make some costly mistakes. This article discusses what you need to know to make sure that you can successfully “tame your wild tools selection process” and yield the best results for your organization.