Version Control

How can software configuration management be compatible with agile software development? Aren’t the two diametrically opposed to one another? Sometimes it may seem that way. There is a commonly perceived tension between SCM and development agility that makes it difficult to achieve an effective yet precarious “equilibrium” between the two:

Software process is becoming more and more important in SCM. Gone are the days of simple configuration managing the source code and software release builds. Now we need to manage versions of the UML models, versions of the requirements, versions of the tests, versions of the iteration plans and be able to create integration streams for all the different disciplines too. Requirement analysts should be able to work on a branch of a use case model, testers should be able to work on a branch of their test model, etc. At the end of an iteration, all of this should be brought together and released as an iteration release, for the process to be properly controlled.

While many people intuitively feel that we should integrate the development tools we use in our software development environment to better manage the development team, the task of actually doing so can sometimes be as big if not bigger than the software project we are trying to develop. It's hard enough trying to implement individual software development tools while you are in the throes of building software, let alone get multiple sets of these tools to start synchronizing and talking to one another.

When used appropriately, process-enabled SCM tools facilitate iterative team software development in a highly dynamic environment. As SCM practitioners, we should educate and guide our customers, the members of software development teams, to exploit the application lifecycle capabilities of process-enabled SCM tools.