By Jeff Amfahr, Senior Product Manager at Seapine Software

Twenty years ago, source code management (SCM) management was a problem reserved for technically savvy users who were comfortable with command lines and complex branching methodologies. Today, everyone in an organization creates, updates, and uses digital assets. The ability to track, merge, and control these assets is now essential to every department. However, expanding source code management outside development is no easy task. The SCM tool you use has to integrate with a wide variety of applications, while also working with all the processes and procedures used throughout the organization.

Many in the software industry see agile development methodologies as the antidote to the process-heavy development practices that are so commonplace today. Success in agile development is measured by the working code produced, not the number of specifications written, models designed, or meetings attended. While agile practices are a breath of fresh air to developers bogged down in process, agile development does not mean throwing out processes and tools. On the contrary, the methodology requires delicately balancing the need for process and structure with the basic desire for solid results.

By Grant Lammi, Technology Strategist at Seapine Software

At the beginning of 2008 Seapine Software released the Quality-Ready Assessment (QRA), a Web based tool to help organizations determine their overall software quality level. The goal was to create a survey that could provide quantifiable measurements about a subject, software quality, which oftentimes is difficult to define, much less measure.

Thanks to hundreds of participants completing the assessment statistical trends are now being discovered.  One of the most interesting so far is that 80% of the respondents use some kind of software configuration management (SCM) tool.  While this clearly shows how mainstream a practice SCM has become in software development it also highlights a very disturbing flip side. That is, while SCM is widely adopted, a full 20% of the respondents do not use any kind of SCM system.