Version Control

When folks started moving to agile development around the turn of the century, they first moved away from using certain automated tools. They did this mostly in order to get rid of project management tools and focus on face-to-face communications. This was a reasonable reaction to what had turned into a world of silos and automated workflow management. We developers were ridding ourselves of the mechanisms that produce all of that ceremony and reams of design documents. We would only use index cards and hand-drawn charts on a whiteboard. We didn’t want any tools to get in the way of the real work we were doing.

If you have recently transitioned to an agile team, you may have questions about the differences between user stories and use cases, especially how they differ from tradition requirements writing. In this article, Charles Suscheck defines each of these requirements types and uses a running example to illustrate how they differ in a real-world setting.

Leslie Sachs predicts 2012 as the year when companies will rediscover the importance of holding onto and developing their human resources like never before. Additionally, the year will challenge CM experts as they try to manage effectively when cloud providers often control significant resources.

CM is about process, but is also about the people who do the day-to-day work. This article by Leslie Sachs shows the lessons she learned from the demanding world of configuration management consulting.