Build Engineering often means that you have to maintain builds that have been around for a while and it is pretty common for the upgrade to Maven 2 to be more trouble than it's worth. In this column we'll take a peek at Maven 1.0.2 which is still used by many large-scale Java SOA builds. While Maven 2 uses pure java, maven 1.0.2 used a scripting language called jelly files    ( http://commons.apache.org/jelly ). As noted on the Apache website, Jelly is a tool for turning XML into...

make clean doesn't.  That's Usman's Law (named after a smart coworker of mine who spent months working with customer Makefiles). make clean is intended to take you back to a state where everything will be rebuilt from scratch.   Often times it doesn't. Here's why.

Continuous Integration, or CI, is a simple, yet powerful concept. Automatically build, regression test, and deploy a software application to a test environment whenever a developer commits a code change to version control. If the build, regression test, or deployment fails, the problem can be isolated to the code change that triggered the CI build. Once isolated, the source of the failure can be identified and corrected to allow the build to complete successfully.

CM adds a great deal of value to any application lifecycle. But there is probably no other area that is so quickly growing as the need for solid Configuration Management to support IT Governance and Compliance. This is due, in no small part, to the Sarbanes-Oxley (section 404) laws as well as the renewed focus on corporate governance in the wake of the credit market crisis. CM practitioners have a responsibility to lend their skills to corporate citizenship by supporting the best practices that ...

In today's increasingly complex corporate environment, the need to geographically distribute software development has become almost the norm. This distribution can be based on several patterns including Multiple Offices, Working from Home and Subcontract Organizations. Each of these shares some common SCM problems as well as has some unique problem areas.

Kovair raises the bar for application lifecycle management solutions and sets the stage for enhancing productivity through their Kovair Global Lifecycle. Automating existing workflows is the only way to really ensure that you have repeatable processes that have complete visibility to all of the stakeholders involved. But that assumes that you already know the exact details of every step in your desired workflow. What if the automated workflow tool that you chose also helped you analyze your proc...

Most corporations today must think in terms of managing a global enterprise. That brings a whole range of issues from IT Governance to tools, people and project issues. The people issues are probably the most complex and potentially provide the greatest risk to the organization itself. How can corporations today address all the complexities of managing a global organization and what exactly does CM have to do with all this? The answer of course is that CM is the glue that holds the whole model...

For some organizations, IT Governance is just another set of standards that is stated yet with few (or no) compliance expectations, little actual verification occurring, few or no metrics to indicate compliance, and even less use of the results by senior management to run their organization.  As written in my recent article, "Framework for Implementing and Evaluating Standards", without true support for standards, including practices, policy, verification, metrics, and mana...

Spare the rod; spoil the child.  It's an old statement that conveys the notion of accountability in raising a well-mannered kid.  The concept of accountability is just as true for the software development process.  Making the process and activities transparent to senior management means we can do more than just present work progression.  We can also filter problem areas up the chain as well to help improve the lifecycle. In this article, we'll look at ways that encourag...

There's no doubt about it.  The easiest way to do software development is at a single site. Technology has not changed that.  However, technology has made it a lot easier to do distributed development, even when the sites are distributed half way around the world.  Net meetings, mirror sites, Mega-bit global web access, collaborative software for reviewing documents and code - these all make it a lot easier. What about the CM part of it?  Why is it not quite as easy t...