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.
.
 Get the Feed
|
Lean CM or Agile CM?
Volume 8 - Number 5 - May 2010
 From my point of view, Lean CM or Agile CM?, that is like asking if I want dark chocolate or cherry vanilla ice cream on my double stacked ice cream cone. The obvious answer is that I want both! Lean and Agile are pretty sweet in many other ways as well and you need to embrace both of these disciplines for your software development work - especially when focusing on Configuration Management. The good news is that you came to the right place to learn about Lean CM and Agile CM. Mario Moreira serves up the first delights in his article "Agile and CM - the One-Two Punch!" Joe Farah gives us the "Next Generation of Agile CM" (don't worry Lean is discussed as well). Of course I join in the fun with my view of "Agile CM and Lean CM" in my column, Behaviorally Speaking. Leslie Sachs takes us down memory lane to visit the fathers and grandfathers of Quality in "Personality Matters."
This months big treat is Dr. Wilco Koorn of XebiaLabs who teaches us about "Applying The Lean Principle 'Eliminate Waste' to Software Deployments." Please join me on June 17th for a fantastic webcast with the folks at XebiaLabs as we learn about Deployment Lifecycle Management!
We also take a look back to Alan Koch telling us that Agile means disciplined SCM while David Parker considers Process in an Agile world. Brad Appleton, Robert Cowham, and Steve Berczuk announce the decline and fall of Agile SCM (and the rise of Lean) and last, and always zany, Ben Weatherall gives us Part 3 of Small Teams and SCM. (Great article - enjoy it!)
Make sure that you share your own Lean CM and Agile CM experiences with us each day on CM Crossroads!!!
Bob Aiello
Editor in Chief
CM Crossroads
raiello@acm.org
|
|
Agile and CM One-Two Punch!
by Mario Moreira
Applying Agile methodologies and practices effectively requirement a mindset shift. Some people gravitate to it because it seems the natural thing to do while others struggle. Having an Agile mindset is even more important when you have to support teams that have implemented or are planning to implement Agile. And these days, Agile methodology usage continues to grow more and more in the software development industry.
Read More >>
|
|
|
|
|
CM: THE NEXT GENERATION of Agile CM
by Joe Farah
Lean CM is the process of doing the minimum CM to support development of a product. Of course this can result in less than optimum returns. Agile CM is the ability to adapt CM to the specific needs of an organization or project. There's a big difference here. Anyone who thinks that Agile Development implies minimal CM is probably in the situation of not having to deal with customers. Instead, Agile Development requires Agile CM, Configuration Management tuned to the Agile Development shop and philosophy.
Read More >>
|
|
|
|
|
Behaviorally Speaking – Lean CM or Agile CM?
by Bob Aiello
Agile has certainly been taking the industry by storm. Many organizations are adopting Agile practices and transforming their teams into a completely new way of working that is extremely effective. Lean has also been catching on with many development teams and it is increasingly common to hear people using Agile and Lean in the same sentence. Is Lean-Agile the new buzzword for the future? Actually, I have become increasingly aware that the terms Lean and Agile are sometimes being used interchangeably and that is cause for great concern. Agile and Lean are not the same, but they do enjoy considerable synergy when used appropriately. You need to understand Lean and Agile in order to be successful in today’s demanding technology environment. Read on if you are ready to accept the challenge of becoming Lean and Agile!
Read More >>
|
|
|
Personality Matters – Lean CM or Agile CM?
by Leslie Sachs
Reading and reflecting upon Lean and Agile this month I realized that technology professionals do not realize how many of these practices are actually from the Quality revolution that was led by luminaries including Shewart, Juran, Crosby and Deming. The Poppendieck’s have certainly done a great job not only with sharing their Lean practices, but also reminding us that process improvement has been successfully implemented in many settings long before it was applied to software development. Join me as we take a quick look back at where the journey to quality began!
Read More >>
|
|
|
Applying The Lean Principle “Eliminate Waste” to Software Deployments
by Dr. Wilco Koorn
The current market trend for producing software nowadays is to apply Agile methodologies such as Scrum and the like. The benefits can be huge and on an enterprise scale those benefits easily run into the millions of dollars. However, in those same enterprises we see observe a typical pattern when software comes out of its production phase and needs to be put in operation: a package is delivered to another department, and is then deployed on production systems. This is the area of software deployments.
We claim there generally is a lot of waste in the deployment process and the elimination of that waste can easily save funds in the 1 million dollar order. We will first discuss what is waste in Agile terminology, then point at waste in a general deployment process after which our claim simply proved when observing what KLM/Air France did to minimize its waste.
Read More >>
|
|
|
|
|
|
When Small Teams Grow
by Ben Weatherall
This, the third in a four part series on Small Teams[1] and SCM, deals with what happens when small teams grow to the extent that they can no longer be considered small. There are again two categories where this applies – where small teams continue working on the same product/project and where new teams are fielded to take on additional products/projects. I will not be considering the second of these due to space constraints. If there is enough interest, I can address it after the series is completed.
Read More >>
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Articles 
