Volume 8 - Number 11 - November 2010

Configuration Management is a critical function especially when managing a large scale enterprise wide technology technology development effort. Coordinating the work of hundreds (or even thousands) of developers obviously needs well defined processes. So what about the small team? Do small teams need CM? And, if so, how much process? What are the essential requirements for supporting Software Configuration Management in a small team? How is CM deployed in a small team compared to a large team? You have come to the right place for addressing these and other issues.

Leslie Sachs takes the lead this month when she considers SCM Essentials within an Agile SCRUM in her column Personality Matters - SCM Essentials for Small Teams. Guy Marion gives us Getting Started with Source Code Management (SCM) for Small Teams while Joe Farah provides us with CM: The Next Generation of the Small Team ALM. Ben Weatherall delivers his fourth and final part in his series on small teams - When Large Teams Shrink and Joe Townsend gives us SCM Essentials for Small Team: Less Can Be More. Not to be left behind I ask the age old question of "does size matter" in my column Behaviorally Speaking. Make sure that youdrop me a line and let me know about your experiences with support SCM in your small (and large) teams!

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

Featured articles...

CM: THE NEXT GENERATION of Small Team ALM by Joe Farah I got a chance to take in a fair bit of the ALM EXPO this year... some good talks, still accessible.  However, in the opening keynote, I was surprised at how the panelists responded to one of the questions pertinent to this month's journal.  The question was:  Does size matter for ALM?  The answers tended to center around level of implementation and complexity of the application - are the teams operating globally; are they small enough for verbal communication; and so forth. Read More >>

Getting Started with Source Code Management (SCM) for Small Teams by Guy Marion Your developers and designers often work on projects simultaneously from around the world. They need to modify the same files, make updates, and deploy multiple versions of the website or code across different sites. All the while, you hope they won’t cross wires, lose track of versions, or overwrite each others’ changes, any which scenario might set your upcoming release or project delivery date back by days. Sound familiar? Read More >>

SCM Essentials for Small Teams: Less Can Be More by Joe Townsend 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...

Personality Matters – SCM Essentials for Small Teams by Leslie Sachs Personality matters a great deal when you need to be able to help a small team implement essential software configuration management practices. Small teams have dynamics just like any other team and you need to know what it takes to help your team achieve success. SCRUMs may have a maximum size of nine members, but you will likely find yourself in organizations where successful teams grow and you have to deal with the dynamics implicit in a successful team that now has new requirements for communicating and working together successfully. In this column, we will take a look at some of the essentials required for small teams. Read More >> When Large Teams Shrink by Ben Weatherall This, the fourth and final article in a four part series on Small Teams[1] and SCM, deals with what happens when large teams shrink to the extent that they can now be considered small. There are several situations where this commonly happens – when a team has been raided by other teams, when the majority of the work has been accomplished and a large team is no longer needed, or when the corporate situation is such that downsizing occurs. Read More >>

Behaviorally Speaking – SCM Essentials for Small Teams by Bob Aiello Does size really matter? Small Teams do, in fact, operate differently than larger teams and they require a very different level of process. I have implemented enterprise wide software configuration management solutions that impacted hundreds of developers located all over the world. It is tempting to think of a big team as being a collection of small teams and sometimes that’s true. Most often though small teams have unique requirements and there are some practices that essential to employ if you want to be successful. Read More >>

ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207 and 15288: The Entry-Level Standards for Process Definition - Part 1 by James W. Moore In 2008, the 12207 standard for software life cycle processes and the 15288 standard for system life cycle processes were revised in an effort that finally harmonized system and software processes as well as bringing the respective IEEE and ISO/IEC standards into complete agreement. Some users mistakenly believe that these standards are targeted only to large organizations able to make a substantial investment in a complete suite of software and systems processes. However, these standards are also the best entry point for beginning users who desire guidance on as few as a single process. This three-part article will explain how entry-level users can apply the two standards. Read More >> SCM Essentials For Small Teams by Chayim Kirshen Small teams and small organizations tend to think of SCM as revision control, and software construction.SCM tools are reduced to the ability to check in and check out code. Teams rarely use the extended features and best practices of revision control systems, so let's review how more efficient revision control can help small teams. Read More >> SCM Essentials for Small Teams by Pablo Santos Luaces Very small teams think that SCM (Software Configuration Management) is not for them. Even the name sounds like a big thing: CM, configuration management. "Why should I care?" They say. Small teams code, and that's actually a very good thing. But they normally refuse to use the bare minimum to work, the three core pillars as I usually refer to: version control, task tracking and testing. Read More >> Applying CM to Agile Teams by Mario Moreira A variety of Agile methods and practices have now been around for a solid 10 years and existed for at least another 10 years prior. Configuration Management (CM) for Agile development has now been discussed since the turn of the century. So what are the core principles of CM and how can CM help Agile teams? Read More >>