Version Control

Articles

GMSL 1.09: A look inside the tweaks and updates

I've written in the past about the GNU Make Standard Library open source project. This article outlines the changes made between v1.0.2 and the current release (v1.0.9) and discusses some of the techniques used to implement the GMSL.

John Graham-Cumming's picture John Graham-Cumming
Study of Myers-Briggs Types Relative to CM Professionals (2007)

Mario Moreira conducted a study of CM professionals to find out what similarities and differences could be found between them. He then compared those results with what he learned from a similar study he conducted four years prior, to see what has changed, and what's stayed the same.

Mario  Moreira's picture Mario Moreira
Commonsense CM Strategies to Meet Good Quality Requirements

Quality requirements are an elusive goal for any complex product development effort. A strong process and good tools can help advance requirements toward higher quality over time. The product development team plays an important role in establishing quality requirements. In a well-oiled customer/ developer relationship, frequent feedback will go both ways. Unknowns will be explored and change will occur. It's important that CM/ALM tools can clearly track requirements and their changes in a way that helps to capture increasingly improved requirement baselines.

Joe Farah's picture Joe Farah
The One Right Way to Achieve High-Quality Requirements:

Many authorities have undertaken to lay out the one right way to engineer system requirements. Although there are similarities among them, what is most striking is the diversity in approaches and, in some cases, conflicting philosophies. What are we to make of these dueling authorities and their competing guidelines?

 

Alan S. Koch
Makefile Debugging: A introduction to remake

remake forked from GNU Make 3.80 and is currently at version 0.62.   This version incorporates some, but not all, of the changes made in GNU Make 3.81. 

John Graham-Cumming's picture John Graham-Cumming
Traceability and Auditability: Satisfying your Customers

When we deliver software products, we need to be able to tell our customers what they're getting. Not only product documentation, but specifically, every time we deliver a new release we need to relay what problems were fixed and what new features were added. If the software is subject to periodic audits, we need to tell them even more, especially the abiltiy to trace a requirement or change request to what was changed.

Joe Farah's picture Joe Farah
How Audit Trails and Traceability Mitigate Risk

Traceability doesn't prevent errors and an audit trail does little to help me to recover from one. Does this mean they aren't valuable CM tools? On the contrary, audit trails and traceability are two of our most important CM tools for learning how to mitigate risk.

Alan S. Koch
Lean Development Principles for Branching and Merging

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.

Configuration Management Planning: What To Do Before you Start

Configuration management planning should not start as you put together your CM Plan. By then, you've already predisposed yourself to how your plan is going to play out.

Joe Farah's picture Joe Farah
GNU Make Escaping: A Walk on the Wild Side

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.

John Graham-Cumming's picture John Graham-Cumming

Pages

CMCrossroads is a TechWell community.

Through conferences, training, consulting, and online resources, TechWell helps you develop and deliver great software every day.