Software Best Practices

Some of the discussion with my co-authors on our May 2008 CM Journal article on Agile Release Management spurred some additional thoughts by me that I hope to refine and work into a subsequent article later this year. Release Management is about so much more than just the code/codeline (and it being...

I started reading through the book Implementing ITIL Configuration Management , by Larry Klosterboer. I'm really not what I'd consider an expert on ITIL nor IT Service Management , but I've had more than my fair share of exposure to it and am certainly no "slouch" in that area either...

Peter Eeles and I must be subconsciously on the same page. Because at the same time I was blogging about Software Architecture Views and Perspectives and Software Architecture Quality Attributes and their direct applicability to SCM/ALM solution architecture (and software process in general), Peter was...

A colleague of mine had a question for me about Distributed Versions Control Systems (or DVCS). There are a growing number of such systems these days: Mercurial , Bazaar , git , svk , BitKeeper , Gnu Arch , darcs , Monotone , Codeville , Arx , just to name a few. I referred them to a good essay by David...

The November 2007 issue of the CM Journal was devoted to the theme of " What Best Practice is Best? " Joe Farah's article on The Top 10 SCM Best Practices was quite possibly the best article on SCM best practices that I've come across to date! Joe actually first lists his top ten "runners...

Almost a year ago I posted an entry on the " 5 C's of Agile SCM Codelines ". This time I'm posting on the 5 R's of Agile SCM Baselines . I think these are as follows (note that most of these are not unique to Agile/Lean): Repeatable -- The steps to create the corresponding Build...

The (hopefully) provocative title of today's blog-entry is inspired by Phil Armour's essay " Software is Not a Product! ", which is one of many profoundly insightful essay's from his book The Laws of Software Process . Armour maintains that: The core issue with the business of software...

The April issue of the CM Journal , and there is a FANTASTIC article in it by Austin Hastings about his Longacre Deployment Management strategy for dealing with database CM. It's long, but well worth the read for the insight into a new way of thinking about and doing CM of a database. The April CM...

My paper in this month's issue of The CM Journal is about Lean-based Metrics for Agile CM Environments . This month we take an "Agile" slant on metrics for CM, including the CM process itself. Agility is supposed to be people-centric and value-driven. So any metrics related to agility should...

The folks over at SmartBear software have written a nice little book entitled The Best Kept Secrets of Code Reviews . It's free if you go over to their webpage and ask for it (you have to fill out a registration form, and it takes a few weeks to arrive, but they havent spammed me at all since I registered...