Volume 8 - Number 10 - October 2010

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a popular and comprehensive approach to managing the development process. Many organizations are moving from a narrow focus on functions like CM, QA and testing to a more comprehensive ALM approach. Understanding and implementing ALM is not easy and CM Crossroads will focus on this topic during our very popular ALM Expo which is bigger and better than ever this year. To help "school" you up on this topic Joe Farah gives us CM: THE NEXT GENERATION - Beyond CM to ALM. Mike Shepherd writes about Beyond CM into ALM - Just a Change of Focus while Leslie Sachs helps us understand the personality issues related to moving from to CM to ALM in Personality Matters. I take an oppositional view in Behaviorally Speaking while Robert Cowham, Brad Appleton and Steve Berczuk explains Agility Throughout the LifeCycle – the Rise of DevOps. We take a look back at Mario Moreira's description of Release Management, the Super Discipline.

This month we introduce a new column on Cloud Computing with Rock Rocaberte introducing Cloud-Driven Development and Bill Portelli showing us the Beauty of Agile in the Cloud.

See you at the Expo!

Bob Aiello
Editor in Chief
CM Crossroads
raiello@acm.org

Featured articles...

CM: THE NEXT GENERATION - Beyond CM to ALM by Joe Farah What an accomplishment - 33 miners rescued in Chile after 69 days of being trapped.  If the technology was there to drill the escape route, and to design the capsule to bring them up, but the rest of the team wasn't integrated - success would have been difficult at best.  There were psychiatrists/psychologists, medical experts and nutritionists, project managers, rescue workers, and overall co-ordination, in addition to the engineers.  The whole team worked together for success. Read More >>

Beyond CM into ALM – Just a Change of Focus? by Mike Shepherd CM or ALM?  Shouldn’t the focus really be on how you can improve your development lifecycle from an end-to-end perspective, and break down the silos between analysts, developers, and testers? Does your team follow ALM principles?  You could argue that every development team practices ALM when creating software products, whether or not they plan to do so.  A given team will typically define their requirements and update them, split them up into developer tasks, then complete, build, test and release them. Read More >>

Personality Matters – Beyond CM into ALM by Leslie Sachs This month’s topic is a paradigm shift that requires that we move from focusing narrowly on the CM function to the much broader Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) view. I know people who cannot make this shift. From a personality perspective, these folks have great difficulty seeing the big picture and the more comprehensive lifecycle view required by ALM. There are good reasons for these problems and, in this article, we’ll examine the personality challenges inherent in shifting from CM into ALM. Read More >>

More articles...

Cloud-Driven Development by Rock Rocaberte Cloud-driven Development is a methodology using cloud resources to improve the software development process from inception to production.  Similar to test-driven development, cloud-driven development can dramatically improve the quality of your development and testing efforts.   Implementing cloud-driven development means providing all of your developers and testers with dedicated test servers in the cloud whenever needed. Read More >> The Beauty of Agile in the Cloud by Bill Portelli  As compared to other development methods, agile is clear, straightforward, and rewarding for all of those who are involved in the process.  Most of you know this already – that’s why you’re here!  Clearly, a successful transition to agile requires a strong organizational commitment and a number of management and development changes.  With that in mind, the white-hot movement to this trend over the past year continues to amaze me.  In striking parallel, the industry has seen this same sort of resonance around the trend to the “cloud” - secure anywhere access by distributed teams to a centralized set of services and compute resources that span the complete lifecycle of the development and deployment process. Read More >>

Behaviorally Speaking – Beyond CM into ALM by Bob Aiello This month’s topic really puzzled me. At face value, it sounds like we are moving from a limited function of CM to the wider function of ALM. Classic configuration management includes four specific functions including configuration identification, change control, configuration audits and status accounting. Often misunderstood, status accounting is following a configuration item throughout its lifecycle. So if we think about how to implement status accounting, we have to consider a full lifecycle approach – which leads us right to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). It’s my view that CM already owned ALM. Read on if you would like to share some lessons learned from implementing what is now known as ALM! Read More >>

Agility Throughout the LifeCycle – the Rise of DevOps by Brad Appleton, Steve Berczuk and Robert Cowham This month we would like to address briefly the term DevOps which is steadily gaining traction and currency, particularly in the world of web apps. We want to give an introduction and some pointers to resources and further reading. Although a relatively recent term, many of the principles have been around for a long time. This is similar to Agile methods – in some ways a repackaging of existing principles. Indeed Robert’s first article for this column, back in 2004, addressed some relevant aspects. Read More >> Release Management, the Super Discipline by Mario Moreira Have you ever wondered what is the best approach to establish the relationship and the placement of the tasks of the various software disciplines?   Have the project managers, developers, and testers been confused because they generally know what CM is but are not clear where CM tasks should occur in a project release lifecycle and how they relate to other disciplines? Read More >>