Most of the readers of this blog are CM specialists. Whether you’re a corporate CM librarian, or a build manager, you are focused on what the industry now calls “Application Lifecycle Management.” That’s an attempt to give a name to the collection of roles and functions we perform. It isn’t so much that the people [...]
Austin Hastings (that’s me) will be speaking at two conferences coming up in October. Both presentations will be focusing on LDM.
First, there’s the Telelogic User Group Conference 2008, in Austin, Texas. That’s obviously focused on Telelogic, and on CM Synergy and Telelogic Change, or whatever it’s called this week. Since I spent a fair amount [...]
A while back, I wrote a review of Guiffy SureMerge for CM Crossroads. I even wrote about the process, here.
I’d like to think that I’m the guy for writing SCM tool reviews. I’ve been a vendor rep, so I know where a whole bunch of the bodies are buried. I am independent, so I don’t [...]
(Note: This is part of the “Dimensions of SCM Challenge” series.)
The simplest capability challenge from an SCM standpoint is SCM capability. Can you, or can your team, effectively manage the changes and/or configuration of your project? It’s hard to diagnose a lack of capability, because the team members are too busy dealing with the symptoms—each [...]
(Note: This is part of the “Dimensions of SCM Challenge” series.)
Changing or unknown requirements can be a huge source of problems for a development team. Fortunately, configuration management is designed to support exactly this development problem. Books and tools abound that address the issues of managing changes, documenting and tracing requirements, and ensuring that the [...]
(Note: This is part of the “Dimensions of SCM Challenge” series.)
For our purposes, there is not much difference between a standard and an interface. Either one can be nearly trivial to support, or can impose enormous costs on the project. Complying with an internal coding standard, an ISO language standard, or a database vendor API [...]
I wrote this stuff—all the dimensions of challenge bits—at the same time as the SCM Techniques. To me, they are two sides of the same coin. The challenges identify types of problem that you might have, or perhaps helps to decompose the problems you have. The techniques help to overcome the problems. I’m submitting both [...]
April is the month for LDM at CM Crossroads. They published two articles, one a case study describing the background in which it was developed, the other a technical introduction.
The case study is here, and the technical details article is here.
I’m eventually going to incorporate LDM info as pages here on Doing Better. But [...]
In many cases there is a difference between a challenge inherent to the subject matter of a project, and a challenge that is part of the project solution. Consider a telephone calling card business. Two obvious parts of the solution would be a database for storing account records (time available for each calling card) and [...]
Technical complexity challenges a project when the problem being solved is complex, or the solution is complex, or the implementation is complex. Simply put, some problems are harder to solve than others. Understanding written English is a hard problem. Understanding spoken English is generally considered an even harder problem. Regardless of the source of complexity, [...]
