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Im Source Code Management The difference is significant in that using workflow automation helps to organize your entire team's work by providing support for workitems (e.g. tasks, defects) that can be tied to changesets - committed to complete a specific set of changes. Robust ALM solutions raise the bar by integrating with requirements tracking, test case automation, incident tracking and even project management solutions so that you can be certain that you have full test coverage and you did not accidentally miss an important requirement. They also make creating robust release notes much easier as well. You need to start your build process by making certain that all configuration items are safely secured and identified in a source code management solution. The next step is to make certain that you have good build procedures in place. Version Identification Fast Builds Deployment Frameworks Code Analysis and Testing Continuous Integration Conclusion About the Author Bob Aiello is a Consultant, Editor-in-Chief for CM Crossroads, and the author of CM Best Practices: Practical Methods that Work in the Real World, Addison-Wesley Professional (http://cmbestpractices.com). Mr. Aiello has over 25 years experience as a technical manager in several top NYC Financial Services firms where he had company-wide responsibility for CM, often providing hands-on technical support for enterprise Source Code Management tools, SOX/Cobit compliance, build engineering, continuous integration and automated application deployment. Bob has served as the Vice Chair of the IEEE 828 Standards working group (CM Planning) and is a member of the IEEE Software and Systems Engineering Standards Committee (S2ESC) Management Board. Mr. Aiello holds a Masters in Industrial Psychology from NYU and a B.S. in Computer Science and Math from Hofstra University. You may contact Mr. Aiello at bob.aiello@ieee.org, link with him at http://www.linkedin.com/in/bobaiello or visit his corporate website http://yellowspiderinc.com
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... the only way that I know of to stop the volleyball is to move CM upstream. That means that I make all of my build automation available to developers as an unofficial "service". If you do that - the devs will never break your build again because THEY will depend upon it. Bob |
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Muhammad Saqib Khan
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... Thank you very much Bob again for your prompt reply. Sure, I will watch your presentations shortly on youtube. Actually it is almost a 'volleyball' in my case too and am quite anxious to correct such problems. Thanks! |
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Bob Aiello
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... it depends a lot on the industry that you are in and whether or not there are any regulatory requirements. In defense, you would likely have a planned build with many mandated controls (try being a build engineer for the FAA :-) I usually ask for a pre-release build from the devs using the same build machines that I will be using. This is very easy to do if you have an automated deployment framework (plug here for a few of my favorite vendors). Otherwise you get into "volleyball" where devs hit the ball over the net to SCM and they it back over the net when the build fails. Finger pointing and lots of wasted time are next. This is precisely the issue that devops is trying to address. You can look for my youtube channel called cmbestpractices where I have a four part presentation on a related topic. |
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Muhammad Saqib Khan
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... Bob: I agree with your all mentioned view points and I learn a lot from it. I would like your opinion that if the builds from development side is not planned or they have not perform unit or integration testing before sending to CM engineer for build generation than the risk of getting error during build generation is quite high, thus all effort, time & cost during configuring and compiling a build for a CM guy waste. I want your opinion in this scenario that whether it can be the lack of process implementation, poor project management or how we can overcome such problems. Our main target is to resolve build generation problems or errors before freezing the code. Also is it necessary that builds should be planned? What would be the approach of modular base builds where only 1-2 files are changed at a time and CM guy has to build incremental Exe's in such case? Please share your experience. Thanks! |
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plementing the tools and processes necessary to support build and release management is an important task that can make the difference between success or failure for your development effort. Build management can be your greatest asset or the source of many problems that could ultimately cost your team a lot of time and effort – along with the risk of increased defects resulting in poor quality. This article lays out the first things that you need to consider in order to win with build management essentials.

