Mark
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Homepage: http://www.principia-it.co.uk
It’s official: I’m a Git (convert)
Posted in Git on April 12, 2013
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 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 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 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 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 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 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 […]
DSF 1.0: Basic Development Rig
Posted in Development Support Framework on July 23, 2012
Before we launch into developing the Development Support Framework we need to set up the basic machines into which we will deploy our development and test system. in order to simulate a heterogeneous environment we will set up two machine initially; a Ubuntu server and a Windows XP desktop. For practical purposes I’m going to […]
Omneity: Progress report
Posted in Plain Old Blog, SCM Tool on July 22, 2012
Little to report. This week has been substantially dedicated to work on the Development Support Framework, but earlier in the week I did spend some time refactoring parts of Omneity’s data layer. The main changes are to the way clients access the underlying database. Rather than direct access through the interface of the DataSourceManagerImpl clients […]
DSF 0.3: Development rig
Posted in Development Support Framework, Plain Old Blog on July 20, 2012
Before we get cracking designing and implementing the development support framework (DSF), let’s define a test rig setup. For practical reasons I’m going to use virtual machines for this setup. And this is the only time (hopefully) that licenses will be in evidence. The rig will consist initially of two virtual machines: a Ubuntu server; […]
