It’s official: I’m a Git (convert)
I’ve tinkered with Git in the past, mainly to familiarise myself with its capabilities and its command line. Recently I needed to do some development work for a client and I knew I would be moving my development environment about between machines (air-gapped systems are fun) and so I would not always have access to […]
Puppet and Windows
Posted by Mark in Configuration Management on October 17, 2012
So, my new role involves more than my usual amount of environment management. Typically I manage environments consisting of a few servers for integration testing. Once things are handed over from development my involvement is usually reduced to providing clear installation instructions for someone else to turn into environment deployments, automated or otherwise. Things are […]
Proposal: Configuration management is a modelling discipline
Posted by Mark in Configuration Management, Plain Old Blog on September 13, 2012
We are all familiar with the basic tenets of configuration management; identification, change control, status accounting, and audit. Some would add other disciplines such as build engineering, release management, and a variety of other disciplines (there seems, however, to be no consensus among these CM expansionists as to which disciplines should be added). I would like […]
ALM tool procurement practices
Posted by Mark in Business, Business Cases, General, Plain Old Blog, Tools 'n' Tips on September 3, 2012
So, you’ve done some research, assembled your requirements, selected a few tools, gone through some demonstrations, and refined your selection. Time to get down to the money. Although money may be a factor in your initial tool selection I would leave it until the very last minute if I were you. Tool vendors can be […]
Being Lazy, Automating Build
Posted by Mark in CMCrossroads, Plain Old Blog, Process, Tools 'n' Tips on August 7, 2012
Being lazy is a fine attribute to acquire. I do not mean that you should not work as best you can, but rather that your should adopt an attitude that wherever possible you arrange things so that you have to do as little work as possible to achieve your objective. Automating builds is an excellent […]
DSF 3.0: Major Components
Posted by Mark in Development Support Framework on July 31, 2012
In a previous DSF post I described briefly the initial installation of the base systems on which we will deliver our development support framework. In this post we consider some of the broad architectural components we want in our development support framework. We will go through some general use cases for the DSF, identifying for […]
DSF 2.0: The DSF Project
Posted by Mark in Development Support Framework on July 28, 2012
In the last post I described how to set up the basic target machines to which we will deploy the DSF as it is developed. In many situations you will be working within an organisation, often with at least some components of a DSF and almost certainly with its own project management requirements (no matter […]
