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CM Crossroads Articles
Articles and Columns that have appeared in the Configuration Management Journal and CM Basics
Behaviorally speaking: When your boss thinks CM is a wa...
by Bob Aiello - August 2002 During a major corporate reorganization I found myself working for the Chief Architect of our firm. My first discussion with this MIT graduate revealed that he believed that having a CM support person was completely unnecessary and that CM should just be accomplished by making copies of source code on Network drives (that are ...
Behaviorally speaking: Becoming a Test Manager. Is this...
Bob Aiello – December 2002 Recently, I gave up my “day” job as a Release Management guru to take on an assignment as a test manager. You might think that this was a strange decision on my part (and honestly I did volunteer knowing that this would require a couple months of 12 hour six day work weeks!). The truth is, I have done more testing (although u ...
Human Resources Corner: Commanding a higher salary in t...
Bob Aiello – December 2002 Judging from the email responses, our new HR Corner (and salary survey) is off to a great start. Many people were certainly interested in corresponding about job search issues, salary and career growth. A number of people wrote in to say that two years ago salaries (and demand) were much higher for technology professionals. We ...
Human Resources Corner: New Years Resolutions – is it t...
Bob Aiello – January 2003 Many people have a tradition of making New Years Resolutions this time of year. Getting more exercise, dieting and improving one-self is a wonderful resolve no matter what time of the year. Many people include finding a better job or advancing one’s career in their list of New Years Resolutions. For others realizing that it is ...
The Benefits of Using CM to Control Your Product's Conf...
by Neil Steeman – August 2002 Mr. Steeman has developed a PowerPoint presentation called "The Benefits of Using CM to Control Your Product's Configuration". The presentation is designed to appeal to the management of a company or project. The thread is that the principles of CM are needed not only to address your product but also to address your organi ...
Process improvement alone is not the “Silver Bullet”
by Andrew Raybould – August 2002 For three decades, people have been saying that software development should be a branch of engineering, and during that time, it seems that a majority of that group has been advocating process improvement as the route to that goal: if we can just write sufficiently detailed and comprehensive procedures, the problem will ...
Overcoming Resistance to Change
by Bob Aiello - April 2002 Technology Professionals engaged in the implementation of a new CM System can face many challenges. Software Developers are notoriously resistant to change especially when there is a perceived loss of control or imposed change in the way that they will be able to work.
Behaviorally speaking: Predictions for the coming year
Bob Aiello – January 2003 Many are wondering what the New Year will bring. We enter 2003 after a tough year and a half. Yet, tough times often bring out the best in all of us. There is certainly fear of World War, Terrorism and continued tough economic challenges. Many readers know that I am an orthodox (Italian) Jew and that I spend a lot of my time ...
Behaviorally speaking: Defining the Software Developmen...
Bob Aiello - July 2002 Defining a Software Development LifeCycle (SDLC) can raise many behavioral or “people” related challenges. Any effort to specify how people should work is bound to meet with extensive resistance and even hostility on the part of the developers who must adhere to the development process. Yet it is essential that the successful CM ...
Behaviorally speaking: Open Systems Analysis and Planni...
Bob Aiello - June 2002 Integrating Software Configuration and Release Management systems with other tools can be very challenging. Many vendors claim that their CM tools “integrate seamlessly” with Requirements Tracking Systems, Defect Tracking, and IDEs. It has been this author’s experience that these “integrations” are often limited at best. Nonethele ...
Managing Requirements – Do we practice what we preach?
Bob Aiello - October 2002 The implementation of a CM tool can become a major systems development and implementation effort. What starts as a small project to secure the firm’s source code can evolve into a major effort to improve programmer productivity. The CM practitioner is often swamped with non-stop requests from the developers who will often only ...
Behaviorally speaking: Homeland Security – Is CM really...
Bob Aiello - September 2002 With news of the conflict in the Middle East and renewed concerns about large-scale terrorism, it is difficult to consider CM an important topic. Surely, efforts to prevent anthrax attacks and aid the victims of terror should be our focus. But our work as CM practitioners does impact Homeland security at many levels and it is ...
The Effects of Application Development in the Global En...
Bob Aiello - May 2002 Enterprise Application Software Development often involves the coordination of work across a large decentralized organization. For example, today’s large financial services firms may find that they have to manage a project being developed by their NYC based business analysts, Java developers in the company’s New Jersey based IT gro ...
Behaviorally speaking: Release Management – Why I love ...
Bob Aiello - November 2002 The Release management process is often an overlooked step in the Software Development LifeCycle. Usually, this “drudgery” is delegated to the most junior member of the team. With little or no background the release manager can make mistakes that can cost the team a great deal of time and effort. Putting out bad releases can u ...
You Shouldn’t Have to be Sherlock Holmes to be a Releas...
Adam Cohen and Bridget Pilloud - November 2002 A serious system problem is immediately visible to your customers, and it immediately impacts your company’s revenue. We used to be able to hobble along with parts of the system not working for a day or two, because the system didn’t directly interact with customers. Now system problems are real-time, with ...
For better Requirements Management and CM, use eXtreme ...
Bridget Pilloud - October 2002 Requirements management is an excellent example of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. As soon as something gets on paper, it changes. Tracing a requirement from initial thought to release takes the efforts of the entire development team. eXtreme Programming can help you and your development partners release your projects ...
The importance of a directory structure for the develop...
Charles Edwards - April 2002 Software Process is becoming more and more important in SCM. Gone are the days of simple configuration managing the source code and software release builds. Now we need to manage versions of the UML Models, versions of the requirements, versions of the tests, versions of the iteration plans and be able to create integration ...
Testing Requirements are met – What links Requirements ...
By Charles Edwards – December 2002 What’s happened to the links between Requirements and Tests? How do we know what to test and when? How do we, and the customers, know we got the system being built right? Testing used to happen at the end of the project process once the whole system had been built. Then testing became an iterative done each time. Now ...
Short List of Predictions For 2003
By Charles Edwards – January 2003 With the current economic and world political trends, 2003 in the software industry could bring anything quite honestly. On the one hand, the world could descend into deeper recession fueled by uncertainty about the whole Middle East situation making the big spenders hold back on serious software investments. And on the ...
Avoid Role Name Confusion
Charles Edwards - July 2002 Don't you find it confusing when you go from one company to another and find all sorts of different names for similar roles people play in the IT software development process? I've had heated debates with people only to find we were in violent agreement and it was the use of different terminology that was causing the incorrec ...