After fifteen years as a trusted source of configuration management information and best practices, CMCrossroads is halting its publication of weekly articles. While the current publishing model is changing, the site will remain active and will be updated regularly with relevant articles from our sister sites, StickyMinds and AgileConnection. Bob Aiello, technical editor of CMCrossroads, says thanks to our loyal readers and contributors and lets you know how you can stay connected.

Effective source code management provides a basis for every essential development best practice, including continuous integration and continuous delivery. The key is realizing just how much valuable metadata is being created in your source code management system and establishing the tools and procedures to make this information available.

The traditional configuration management database (CMDB) is big, complex, difficult to grow and change, and very expensive. Compiling data through data-driven synthesis gives IT organizations a better and more cost-effective method of providing the capabilities of a CMDB. This article explains data-driven synthesis, how it is used to generate CMDBs, and its measurable benefits.

If you want secure, reliable systems, you need all stakeholders actively communicating. This means involving both IT operations and developers in discussions after deployments, to ascertain if anything went wrong and can be avoided, and what went well or could be refined. Integrating your postmortems and retrospectives facilitates collaboration and improves processes.