The theme of Project versus Product is all about determining the scope of effort involved with CM. Should we focus narrowly on the project at hand or take a wider view of the overall product requirements? Most CM experts will tell you that they work under tight deadlines with builds and releases coming in quick succession. I can remember times when I was doing two or more complicated releases per day with little or no time available to work on improving the release management process it...

Waist deep in the Big Muddy And the big fool says to push on. Waist deep in the Big Muddy And the big fool says to push on. Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a Tall man'll be over his head, we're Waist deep in the Big Muddy! And the big fool says to push on!                 - Pete Seeger, 1967 Most companies blame project failures on poor planning and development practices.  As...

Products and Projects - before we get into any SCM discussions, we need to classify these beasts - what are their distinguishing marks?! The Lean Development Mailing List had a pertinent discussion on this. Mary Poppendieck commented: Products are development efforts that are (usually) funded incrementally. They start with a concept and end with a product launch. Along the way, they are funded incrementally as they progress through stages such as feasibility, test market, comm...

A CM strategy must deal with product development from both a Product and from a Project perspective.  The former deals with the state of a product, the requirements, features, problems, quality, etc.  The latter deals with managing the tasks that will take the product through its many milestones.  Dashboard technology can help to clarify the perspectives and simplify the management functions, especially from an information perspective.

Download a PDF version of this Product Review >>  Technology managers need to define repeatable processes to meet the business and technology demands of any Application Lifecycle effort.  Deadlines, budgets and emerging technologies make both large and small development efforts challenging for even the most skilled and experienced professionals. Requirements tracking, including user driven specifications, is so challenging that an entire development movement has ari...

Configuration Management (CM) provides organizations with a level of control over the changes that occur in the engineering space.  It can help protect the valuable code assets of the revenue generating products within the organization.  CM provides the capability for products to manage the pieces therein that change at different rates, exposes the changes that are occurring, and establishes knowledge of the baseline of the product which then improves integrity and minimizes p...

Everyone knows the difference between Products and Projects – right? I mean, doesn’t everyone understand what these terms mean and what functions Software Configuration Management (SCM) provides to them? Maybe so, but not in my personal experience. The tasks associated with Product Management and Project Management vary as much as their definitions. In the following sections, I will give a few definitions and show how SCM supports the various stages in both...

Years ago, I learned of commercial tools that automated builds and deployments by executing a combination of command line instructions and scripts. At the time, I questioned the value that these tools could provide. Even though the tools were promoted for build and deployment automation, they did not generate the command line instructions and scripts to actually build and deploy applications. The new tools did not replace existing build tools like Ant and make. Instead, the tools required that t...

All of the industry standards (e.g. IEEE 828, EIA 649-A) and frameworks (e.g. Cobit 4.1, ITIL v3) state that all Configuration Items must be controlled and uniquely identified. Many CM experts get a little puzzled by this requirement and I am often shocked to find out how many production releases have runtime components that cannot identify themselves to the operations support team. It's really not hard to make all of your release components fully capable of identifying themselves. In this artic...

This month, I will explore the various situations wherein a repository is modified, starting with the simplest case of a single developer making a change to a single file. Editing a Single File Consider the simple situation where a developer needs to make a change to one source file.  This case is obviously rather simple: