As organizations integrate software into every aspect of business, they are constantly pressured to deliver faster, better, and cheaper results. Unfortunately, a "dis-integrated" software delivery approach reduces returns while increasing costs. This IBM Rational White Paper shows how Integrated Requirements Management aligns organizations around maximizing value and keeping pace with change.

Effective governance for lean development isn’t about command and control. Instead, the focus is on enabling the right behaviors and practices through collaborative and supportive techniques. Scott Ambler and Per Kroll write how it is far more effective to motivate people to do the right thing than it is to force them to do so. Learn how to form a lightweight, collaboration-based framework that reflects the realities of modern IT organizations.

As enterprise software systems continue to grow in complexity, IT is struggling to find better ways to meet the increasing business demands. With pressure to create higher quality software more quickly and at less cost, enterprise IT must find ways to streamline development. One way that organizations are meeting this challenge is by implementing ways to drive a successful software reuse initiative.

Few companies plan each project’s SCM environment effectively. More typically, a project manager evaluates the project’s needs, modifies the global SCM project template, and then starts the project. Developer unhappiness or project delays may ensue as a result of this mismatch between SCM policy and a project’s scope and risk. Avoid these common problems by learning SCM best practices.

Former Giga and Forrester Analyst Uttam Narsu has worked with hundreds of differing software development environments and has put together these SCM best practices in this compelling white paper.

Evaluating Continuous Integration and Build Management servers may appear like a trivial task; however as this paper demonstrates, the devil is in the details. While there are feature check lists available online, most of those feature lists are haphazard and do not focus on features that address specific pitfalls that may be encountered during the adoption of either Continuous Integration or Build Management. Vendor materials tend to focus on the benefits of adopting a particular practice and not on the features that will ultimately make that adoption successful. Having been involved in numerous RFPs in this area, we have seen organizations struggle to define feature set requirements and evaluation criteria for solutions in this space. The goal of this paper is to help ease that pain.

The heartbeat of Agile software development is the iteration – the ability to create working, tested, value-delivered code in a short time box. Mastering this skill takes guidance and practice. In this paper, Dean Leffingwell describes the iteration pattern and the activities that a team engages in to meet this key challenge.

Two thirds of all software projects fail according to the Standish Group’s CHAOS study and improper usage of software configuration management is largely to blame.  Process improvement eludes many organizations due to the increasing complexity of their development environment. Learn how to design scalable SCM best practices to effectively manage these complexities and the 7 key steps required to address the people, process and technology challenges demanded by best practice adoption.  This paper is authored by Uttam Narsu, formerly a SCM analyst with Forrester Research and Giga Information Group.

Continuous integration, while not a new concept, is rapidly being adopted as a key technology process in software development organizations as part of the shift towards Agile methodologies.  Coupled with a robust SCM system and the proven best practices engineering managers, quality assurance managers and developers can use continuous integration to improve software quality, reduce costly rework due to broken builds, and thus ultimately increase the business value delivered to customers. This paper introduces the concept of continuous integration and outlines several proven software configuration management (SCM) best practices to consider when implementing continuous integration.

The Evolution of Build and Release Management for Effective Software Delivery: A Customer Survey with Case Studies