Episode: Introduction to SCM - Interview with SteveBerczuk?

Background Steve:
- What is the work that you do (ie, you're not an SCM Person per se)
  - My current job a an Agile Software Development consultancy.
  - SCM is something every developer needs to be concerned with and it's something many people shy away from like.
- How did you get interested in SCM?
  - First SW Dev job where we had a good SCM Process
  - Patterns
- why he wrote the SCM Patterns book.
  - Brad and PLoP?
Typical introduction of SCM:
- why?
- challenges?
- myths?
- products that most know: CVS, Clearcase, Subversion, Perforce
Agile and SCM: Agile (and other) teams are starting to pay attention to SCM (what? On the contrary: the concern for SCM has never been so low! Agile is most often understood as /main/LATEST, synchronous process, and throwing away any kind of management).
- SCM, Build, Release are often treated as oftens, and build scripts not given the same attention as code.
SCM as part of the Development Process -- so the context in which you work affects the "best" way to do SCM.
- SCM/Version Management —Version control is one of the prehistories of SCM: the source of one tradition (the other one being paper based accounting of parts in the automobile industry); Linus Torvalds speaking of Source Code Management (meaning Control) is just throwing away 30 years of development (or lack thereof): can this kind of ignorance be called a "best" practice?
- Architecture
- People/Process/Location
- (SCM is about identification/Verification hence there are processes that are closely tied to SCM such as testing, and requirements process and build) -- does this go somewhere else? - MK: I don't know, maybe discuss it below under "SCM as part of the Development Process"?
Tools vs processes - which needs to be first? Is it wrong to select a tool first, then the process?
- The role of tools. (Why people tend to think about tools before the problem and why that isn't useful—and vice versa: why people believe what they ignore [tools in particular] cannot be very important, and what's wrong with that)
Different approaches to SCM - MK: I do not fully understand this. Isn't this about how the project is organized?
- Product v Project (lifetime of artifacts, connection with product owners)
- Small team v Large Team (communication)
- Co-Located team v distributed team (communication)
Versioning Models: copy-edit-merge vs. lock-edit-unlock.
- Explanation of locking models:
  - Exclusive Locking
  - Non-Exclusive Locking
  - Optimistic Locking (locking at commit time only)
- Benefits and drawbacks of each method.
- Usage of them in the different tools. [MK: As Marc noted the comparisons between the tools are not so easy for a podcast, a table or some reading is better suited—Please note that I do not believe that comparison tables are well suited to anything]
Branches in general - working independently for a while ...
- The purposes of branches.
  - Release Branches
  - Task Branches
  - Private Branches.
- Why late branching? (rephrase with: When to branch? Consider also implicit branching as in Mercurial)
Outlook to advanced topics, but don't go into detail:
- Agile SCM
- Distributed SCM?

Reference important links, books, and web resources:

CM crossroads
SCM patterns book

Episode: Agile SCM

If the Introduction is no interview, we could have this topic as interview with Steve. What is different? Along the lines of: http://www.berczuk.com/pubs/BetterSoftwareFeb2006-8-2.pdf

Episode: SCM for platform development

Along the lines of: http://www.lsi.upc.edu/events/aple/Kurmann.pdf Further topics

Multi-site challenges ...
Clearcase UCM

Distributed SCM

Versioning Systems Approaches: Centralized vs. Distributed
- Mention Distributed systems talks by Linus (Git) and Bryan O'Sullivan (Mercurial) in Google's techtalks recorded in Youtube.
DVCS

TBD

this is a list of some interesting topics I think the series should include, although I'm not sure where they could fit.

Inter-file branching vs. Intra-file Branching
ALM? [MK: What is ALM?]
Configuration Management vs. Data Management?

Key features of different SCM tools (I'm not sure about this one, I don't particulary like to hear about tools in podcasts): Dynamic Views (ClearCase), Changeset Management (Perforce), Version tree visualization (PlasticSCM), etc. [ Sorry, I added some pointers to pages explicitly showing my bias, and begging for similar exposition of opinions. I believe there was an implicit bias already -- MarcGirod - 13 Nov 2007] -- CM.kirchermichael - 07 Jan 2008