Archive for February, 2010
Preventing ticket ping-pong
Posted by Mark in CMCrossroads, Plain Old Blog, Process, Tools 'n' Tips on February 27, 2010
This is the first opportunity I have had for a while to put something on this blog — busy, busy, busy. (I can tell you that I am building up a fairly sizeable backlog of articles on parallel development and I will, I promise, get round to publishing them soon.) In the meanwhile, here’s a [...]
In the beginning…
Posted by Mark in CMCrossroads, Parallel Development Principles, Plain Old Blog, SCM Tool on February 18, 2010
…was the definition. In this article I am going to lay out my definitions for some terminology that will become increasingly important as I develop my CMS model. The terms I will be discussing are as follows. Stream Branch Configuration Item Revision Configuration Component Repository Configuration Management Database Record At this point I caution the [...]
Fences and Ambulances
Posted by Mark in CMCrossroads, Plain Old Blog, Process, Tools 'n' Tips on February 17, 2010
Suppose you are in charge of a cliff edge. Your task is to maintain the views from the cliff, but keep visitors safe. You can construct a fences along the top of the cliff, to stop people falling over, or you can place ambulances at the foot of the cliff, to clear up once someone [...]
CMS Tool: High-level architecture
Posted by Mark in CMCrossroads, Plain Old Blog, SCM Tool, Software Configuration Management on February 11, 2010
Continuing my musings about a universal configuration management tool I’ve drafted the basic architecture. This is summarised in the following diagram (after the break).
Parallel development: theory and practice
Posted by Mark in Configuration Management, ITSLM, Parallel Development Principles, Plain Old Blog, Software Configuration Management, Version Control on February 10, 2010
Having spent the past couple of weeks with a client working through the issues that need to be carefully considered when version controlling software, and in particular how to manage and control parallel development. I have come to three conclusions: People are often more afraid of the perceived problems than the practical realities of parallel [...]
Who’s afraid of the big bad merge?
Posted by Mark in CMCrossroads, Parallel Development Principles, Plain Old Blog, Software Configuration Management, Version Control on February 1, 2010
A common objection to using parallel development is the fear of the inevitable merging required to reintegrate the changes as the development proceeds. In this post I will take a look at some of the issues that arise from managing parallel development and, perhaps more importantly, provide some guidance on how to avoid the pitfalls [...]
