Archive for category Build Management
Building a CM system using Atlassian
Posted by Mark in Build Management, Change Management, CMCrossroads, Configuration Management, Plain Old Blog, Reviews, Software Configuration Management on May 7, 2011
I’m usually somewhat reluctant to make recommendations about specific tools, but every now and then something impresses me so much I feel I should at least draw attention to it. In the course of helping a client look for tools to support their development process I recalled that a couple of years ago I looked [...]
Keeping configuration separate in ANT
Posted by Mark in ANT, Build Management, Plain Old Blog on October 21, 2010
Actually, this advice holds for any software system, but in this article I am focussing on ANT. One often sees, in ANT scripts, something like this at the head of the build.xml file. So far, so good. The author of this ANT script has thought to define properties that control the script’s behaviour at the [...]
When is a change a change?
Posted by Mark in Build Management, Change Management, Configuration Management, Plain Old Blog, Software Configuration Management, Version Control on June 12, 2010
A change can be viewed in two ways; conceptually or literally. What I mean by this distinction is that when I say the requested change is to “correct spelling mistakes in the poem” I am specifying conceptually what the change is to achieve (and after the fact, what the change achieved). On the other hand [...]
Stubbing in build processes
Posted by Mark in Build Management, CMCrossroads, Configuration Management, ITSLM, Plain Old Blog on January 5, 2010
When developing systems of any size the development team inevitably encounters the following problem. The developers of one sub-system need access to functionality to be provided by another, but the second sub-system is not in a position to provide the functionality and probably will not be for some time. When this happens it is common [...]
Stabilizing builds
Posted by Mark in Build Management, CMCrossroads, ITSLM, Plain Old Blog on January 4, 2010
One challenge facing build managers is how to control the environment in which builds are performed. How to ensure that each repeated build uses the same sources, the same libraries, the same compilers, and so on. Only by ensuring all these elements can we truly claim to be able to reproduce a build reliably and [...]
