Each month the CM Journal provides original content articles and regular columns from industry thought leaders and software providers on a wide variety of configuration management and application lifecycle management topics.
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Which Best Practice is Best?
Volume 8 - Number 3 - March 2010
 Configuration Management is all about spreading practical and effective best practices. Deciding which best practice is best can feel a lot like trying to pick out your favorite lollipop in a giant candy store. I have focused on process improvement and the practical implementation of best practices througout my entire career and I can tell you that the writers at CM Crossroads are top experts in showing us "Which Best Practice is Best."
Ben Weatherall leads the way with his article entitled "Got Best Practices?" which describes Software Architecture, Branching and Merging, Hardware CM and Documentation. Joe Farah gives us his top 10 CM Practices in "CM: The Next Generation of ALM Best Practices" while Leslie Sachs tells us how to reach inside ourselves to reach our inner best practices. Alan Koch takes us in search of the Elusive "Best Practice." Balaji OS and Gunjan Saxena tell us about "Leap-IT: LEan Accelerators for Productivity improvement in IT" while Joe Townsend explains what a "best" practice really means. Brad Appleton, Robert Cowan and Steve Berczuk welcome co-author Geoff Thorpe with his article on CM as Communication and Coordination Enabler. Naturally, I don't want to be left behind so I share my view of best practices in Behaviorally Speaking where you can read about my new book on CM Best Practices which has just been released in pre-published form on Safari Rough Cuts!
We take a look back at Chayim Kirshen's Release Engineering Best Practices, Dick Carlson's SCM Best Practices - Determining Which Practices are Best for You, and Mario Moreira's Comparing the Relative Value of CM Practices.
You have come to right place to learn and share the best practices that are truly best for your success!
Bob Aiello
Editor in Chief
CM Crossroads
raiello@acm.org
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Got Best Practices?
by Ben Weatherall
Why is it that we keep revisiting “Best Practices?” It is not that they are not well covered, it is that they keep changing and that every time we look at the Process of Development from a different perspective, we learn something new. Over the last few years, I have found that what we do under the guise of CM differs in how we identify the problems to be solved, how we address those problems and even what tools are appropriate.
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Personality Matters – Which Best Practice is Best?
by Leslie Sachs
Best Practices are the result of creative and hardworking professionals evaluating and communicating what works and what doesn’t. Getting the right best practice in place requires personality traits that focus on doing the right thing without regard for whether or not you invented the idea or perhaps learned it from someone else. Sorting through the available choices can be very difficult and too often we focus on who came up with the idea versus what the idea truly represents in terms of value. Coming up with Best Practices which are truly Best requires that we reach deep inside our own personalities for the traits that truly help us excel in everything we do. This article is about how to put your personality to work for you in a creative and productive way.Read More >>
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In Search of the Elusive "Best Practice"
by Alan S. Koch
A friend and fellow consultant has been known to react quite strongly to the phrase "Best Practice". Anyone who is unlucky enough to have James within earshot when they utter that phrase is likely to receive a dressing down for using it."There is NO such thing as 'best practice'!" he will inform them in his not-so gentle manner. "There are only good practices that are appropriate under certain circumstances!"
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Leap IT: Lean Accelerators for Productivity improvement in IT
by Balaji OS and Gunjan Saxena
“Expectations from IT just keep increasing every single day “– this is a point of view echoed by several CIOs across the organizations all over the globe. Newer developments in IT like Social Networking, Green IT, Virtualization, Shared Services, and Business analytics is are slowly changing the way in which businesses are run. It is no surprise to see the traditional manufacturing and automobile sectors looking at online media such as m-commerce, blogs, podcasts and twitter to be potential channels for business development. There are enough case studies to prove that the twenty- first century organizations would be largely influenced by advancements in information technology (IT).
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What is a “best” practice?
by Joe Townsend
While I normally don’t like to play on words, or play on semantics this is one time it is essential. First we have to define the word best. Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online defines the word best as: excelling all others. So we can say that a best practice is one that excels all other practices. It’s not just a good practice, or a great practice, or a better practice it achieves the status of being the practice that is above all other practices.
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CM as Communication and Coordination Enabler
by Brad Appleton, Robert Cowham, Steve Berczuk and Geoff Thorpe
This month we have a co-author Geoff Thorpe, who's background includes configuration management, test and performance work, most recently for the Royal Bank of Scotland. This article includes some of the material that Geoff presented at a recent BCS CMSG event.
A classic definition of CM refers to:
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Behaviorally Speaking – Which Best Practice is Best?
by Bob Aiello
Best Practices are wisdom. Instead of reinventing what others already know, technology professionals learn from their colleagues and then willingly share valuable information about what works and what doesn’t. Trying to decide which best practice is best is a journey in analyzing the details of the practice as well as taking an honest look at how we achieved the results. Best Practices exist in every field from food preparation to medicine. Much of what technology professionals have learned comes from the engineering field – although I would argue that we have also learned a great deal from the field of applied psychology as well! If you are ready to ramp up your best practice skills then fasten your seat belt and take a trip with me down the wild roller coaster of Best Practices!
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Release Engineering Best Practices
by Chayim Kirshen
Good build teams know that stewarding the production build process, is only the beginning the of job. The real question is what happens after a build is done. How are builds tracked? How do you track what was released? How do you escrow your environment?
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SCM Best Practices - Determining Which Practices Are Best for You
by Dick Carlson
What are industry best practices for Software Configuration Management (SCM)? Which best practices are best for your project - for your organization? How should these best practices be applied or implemented to solve your SCM problem domain? Is your project or organization prepared to use SCM best practices? Are there good best practices and not-so-good best practices, or are some SCM best practices better than others? What should you know before applying SCM best practices to your project or to your organization? Let's examine a collection of SCM best practices.
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Comparing the Relative Value of CM Practices
by Mario Moreira
Within the world of CM, there are a number of practices, sometime called ‘best', that are implemented on a project and within an organization. The practices provide a level of structure for a workplace.
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