A look back at the year on CMCrossroads

Sandy Sidhu's picture

 

Top 5 Stories on CM Crossroads in 2013

The Basics: VPATH and Path This article is about two pieces of GNU Make syntax that seem to be widely misunderstood or simply avoided outright: VPATH and vpath. Part of the reason for this fear of VPATH is that their use can make Makefiles difficult to understand and debug... even though they were designed to simplify Makefile structure!

An Agile Perspective On Branching and Merging This article focuses on branching and merging. We present some background for branching and merging, and consider some of the implications for agile development in particular. We also hope to reduce some of the suspicion that many agile developers have of branching. The article assumes some overall branching knowledge and yet revisits some particular details that often seem to confuse people.

Wrangling a Release: The Role of Release Manager Companies that develop multiple products often struggle with how to ensure they all work together as a solution and struggle with how to get the deliverables from various products together into a working release. Project managers and product managers have other priorities to handle. So who handles a release that wrangles together multiple project deliverables from multiple products that define a solution or complex release? The answer is the Release Manager.

The Pitfalls and Benefits of GNU Make Parallelization Many build processes run for hours with build managers commonly typing 'make' and going home for the night. GNU Make's solution to this problem is parallel execution, which is a simple command-line option that causes GNU Make to run jobs in parallel using the dependency in the Makefile to run in the correct order. This article looks at parallel GNU Make and points out the pitfalls and how to work around them to get maximum parallelism.

An Agile Perspsective on Branching and Merging This article looks at look at some detailed examples of types of merge - a couple of examples clarifies pages of theory!  

What story made your Top 5? Share it in the comments!