Happy New Year! The hope of a better year is ahead. What is your CM weather report? Some of us have sunny Configuration Management (CM) efforts ahead of us and have begun the planning process. Some are looking across the CM field and into the clouds, some are looking for some agility, and others are considering strategies for CM improvements. As we gaze in the horizon, what do we think will be hot in the CM landscape and improve our working lives?  What might be some of the latest trends in the industry?

My prediction is the CM weather report will be “Cloudy with a chance of Agility”. My predictions will focus on:

• Agile in the forefront of CM
• Extending the CM reach into ALM and beyond
• CM “in the Clouds”

I have also asked several CM professionals what their thoughts are on Configuration Management for 2010 to get a broader perspective.  So let’s take a look into the crystal ball!

Prediction #1:  Agile in the forefront of CM
I predict that we will continue to see a stronger focus on agility in the way we approach and deploy CM.  This is because Agile methods are continuing to increase in adoption.  With the need to adapt and change, comes the need for CM that is both lean, yet well integrated to support the Agile processes.  Some examples of companies moving in this direction are:

• Recently Perforce Software announced their 2009.2 release of its Software Configuration Management (SCM) system. This new release offers a variety of major productivity improvements with the addition of shelving, code review support, real-time metadata replication and additional functionality for working offline. For more on this topic, feel free to read the following “PR Web Perforce press release”.
• For companies seeking complete automation and support of Agile development paradigms, CA SCM Premium Edition includes OpenMake Meister for complete build and binary management.  Administrators can build standard build processes that can be used over and over by developers, teams of developers, QA and Build Management teams.  Builds can be triggered automatically (e.g., Continuous Integration Builds) or during a change package lifecycle promotion. For more on this topic, feel free to read the document “Integrating Agile Methods into your Process Driven Lifecycle”
• We are seeing publications (e.g., books and blogs) focused on bringing agility to CM. 
  • “Adapting Configuration Management for Agile Teams” by Mario E. Moreira, a new book was just released on the Agile and CM market (via Wiley).  This book provides both a CM Primer and an Agile Primer for those wishing to learn more about each topic followed by a chapter on how they can work well together. It then focuses on infrastructure for Agile and how using the cloud can reduce technical debt.  It follows this with a robust chapter on adapting the various CM practices for Agile.  In ends with chapters on identifying good tools for Agile (including CM tools) and adapting to standards and frameworks in an Agile environment.
  • Accident Simplicity – a blog on thoughts about agile software development, software configuration management, and the intersection between the two.  Consider visiting and joining this blog at: http://steveberczuk.blogspot.com/
  • CM for Agile - A blog dedicated to all things Agile and Configuration Management (CM), and sometimes when the two converge.  Consider  visiting and joining this blog at: http://cmforagile.blogspot.com/

Prediction #2:  Extending the CM reach into ALM and beyond
As we continue into the future, we will see CM extending into the ALM space and then see ALM extended into a more unified approach.  Integration across engineering areas helps teams streamline their processes and reduces the effort of implementation and maintenance of manual integrations.  Two such examples of extending the reach include:

• CA is developing a holistic Change, Configuration & Release Management (CCRM) solution.  The CA CCRM framework integrates the tools you already have, with additional CA tools where needed, to create a single unified change management process with role specific user interfaces.  A simpler way to put it is that multiple change management tools like CA Service Desk Manager, CA Clarity, and CA Spectrum Automation Manager can be fully integrated with CA CMDB for configuration management and impact analysis.
• Moving into 2010, there will be a need to establish Agile ALM solutions with CM as its core for organizations looking to improve and scale their Agile processes while still maintaining control.  The focus could be on the need for deep integrations of the best of breed tools and a single company to provide the services in order to make it successful. Look for some of the innovative tool companies like AccuRev, Rally, and AnthillPro and some others to take the lead on this.

Prediction #3:  CM “in the Clouds”
As we looking into 2010 and the future, there may be two focus areas relating to the “Cloud”.  The first is ensuring that there is configuration management of the Cloud infrastructure and the second is that there will be more of a focus on hosted CM services in the clouds.  Companies are looking for software as a service (SAAS) solutions to limit their infrastructure debt, but these environments also require solid configuration management so the customers of the SAAS solutions can feel confident that changes within these environments will be effectively managed.  The second is providing a CM service for software development in the clouds.  This way development teams do not need to incur the cost and effort of setting up a CM environment and maintaining it, but instead use a CM environment in the clouds with built in version control, build management, and defect tracking tools that already exist.  Some additional insight in these areas include:

• According to Andrea Hamer, we will see a need for configuration Management for the cloud.  In her article Elastra's Top 10 predictions for the Cloud in 2010, she writes, “As companies start building private clouds they will run into the classic problems of managing complex production systems. So change and configuration management of infrastructure clouds will become the primary technical challenge to be met in 2010.”

• According to Greg Tasonis, “2010 is the year that the barriers to Cloud SCM (perceptual and technical) are torn down and it goes mainstream”.  Evidence of this is the SCM Solution product.  Where the CM tool is actually a hosted environment where customers can access Rational tools via their web/CCRC interfaces.

Prediction #4: Thoughts from CM Professionals
As I was considering the direction of Configuration Management, I reached out to a few other CM professionals (each with 12 or more years of experience) to get their perspective on the future of CM.  Here are their thoughts:

“Agility will be very hot topic for 2010. People have understood that agile methods can be deployed from very small to very large projects. More and more development teams and other teams will adopt agile methods in their daily work. This will push more CM professionals to adopt agile methods as well as CM tools to better support and deploy agile methods.”  - Yuehui “Pauline” Tao (15 years of CM experience)

“I think that in the coming years, you are going to see CM become a more recognized profession, with more industry recognition.  I think that we will see CM struggle to keep up with supporting the changing technologies and ever compressed release cycles. With the increased recognition of the profession and the value that CM professionals bring to projects, potentially more funding will be designated to putting the infrastructures in place to meet that challenge.”  - Rena Long (12 years of CM experience)

“CM will expand its share on CM as a service (my own name CMAAS) and cloud computing.  In addition to providing version control capabilities as service, there will be offerings to provide automated builds as a service”  - Raghuchandra “Rags” Kinnigoly (12 years of CM experience)

“Open source CM tools will gain a little more market space; some commercial tools may die due to competition from open source tools and other dominating commercial tools.  Also, Agile will be even more popular with more adoption.”  Yunhong “Grace” Gao (12 years of CM experience)

“We will see a shift towards CM solutions that tightly integrate with process tools to support effort-free enforcement of development lifecycle methodologies, such as agile for example (or any other for that matter).”  - Alena Ivanova (15 years of CM experience)

Summary
As we look into 2010, conditions may get cloudy but not in the meteorological sense.  Companies are looking for “software as a service” (SAAS) solutions to limit their technology debt, but will want to ensure the infrastructure is well managed.  Agility will continue to show up in various forms in both the Configuration Management (CM) and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) contexts.  Also, books such as “Adapting Configuration Management for Agile Teams” and blogs will help CM and Agile teams understand and adapt to Agile methods.  Whether your forecast is sunny or cloudy (or both), consider flexibility, adaptability, and agility in driving your business!  Have a productive 2010!!!

References

• AccuRev - http://www.accurev.com
• Perforce Software, Inc - http://www.perforce.com
• CA CCRM - http://www.ca.com/files/Demos/ccm_demo.swf
• Rally Software Development Corp - http://www.rallydev.com
• CA SCM - http://www.ca.com/us/products/product.aspx?ID=255
• OpenMake Meister - http://www.openmakesoftware.com/meister-info/
• SCM Solution - http://www.scmsolution.com/

Mario Moreira is a Columnist for the CM Journal, a writer for the Agile Journal, an Author, an Agile and CM expert for CA, and has worked in the SCM field since 1986 and in the Agile field since 1998.  He has experience with numerous SCM technologies and processes and has implemented SCM on over 150 applications/products, which include establishing global SCM infrastructures.  He is a certified ScrumMaster in the Agile arena having implemented Scrum and XP practices.  He holds an MA in Mass Communication with an emphasis on communication technologies.  Mario also brings years of Project Management, Software Quality Assurance, Requirement Management, facilitation, and team building skills and experience. Mario is the author of a new book entitled “Adapting Configuration Management for Agile Teams” (via Wiley Publishing).  It provides an Agile Primer and a CM Primer and how to adapt CM practices for Agile Teams. Mario is also the author of the SCM book entitled, “Software Configuration Management Implementation Roadmap”.  It can be found at www.wiley.com, www.wileyeurope.com, and www.amazon.com (search for Mario Moreira).  It includes step-by-step guidance for implementing SCM at the organization, application, and project level with labor-saving templates on CD.

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David Bainbridge said:

... To some extent the emergence of ALM represents a re-marketing of Configuration Management. If you think of Software Configuration Management as CM (in the ISO10007 or EIA649 sense) of software products then there is close match between the management of Product Configuration Information and what ALM purports to do. I am waiting for the first adverts for ALM Engineers ... anyone who has worked with Software Configuration Management should find it familiar. Those only familiar with the other sort of SCM (Source Code Management) will find that they have to expand their scope beyond the source code.

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February 01, 2010
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Frank Schophuizen said:

... In contrast with the prediction of Rena Long, I predict that the recognition of the CM profession will continue to be low, and even decrease due to the integration of CM with ALM (prediction #2). In addition to CM integration with ALM, I predict that CM will be integrated more with RM (requirement management), TM (test management), QA (quality assurance) and PM (project management). Jazz (by IBM Rational) is one of the forerunners. And with prediction #3, it may be useful to mention CollabNet.

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January 26, 2010
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