Archive for category Tools 'n' Tips
Grinding my gears. Marketeers (again)
Posted by Mark in Plain Old Blog, Tools 'n' Tips on January 27, 2012
Yesterday I posted on how I get annoyed by marketeers making groundless claims for their tools (or at least claims for which they provide no supporting data). Here’s another thing tool vendors do that irritates the hell out of me… answering a question with ‘buy my tool’ or ‘my tool solves this problem’ type posts. [...]
Marketing claims
Posted by Mark in Business, Business Cases, Plain Old Blog, Tools 'n' Tips on January 26, 2012
One thing that’s always bugged me is unfounded, or at least unsupported, claims made by tool vendors (actually, by anyone, but in this context particularly tool vendors). I’m starting to call them out whenever I can. Here’s an example of what I mean, posts on forums where claims like the following are made. Eliminate the [...]
Running ANT within ANT under a different JVM
Posted by Mark in ANT, Plain Old Blog, Tools 'n' Tips on March 24, 2011
Problem You have set up a continuous integration build using CruiseControl. The build loop initiates your build using an ANT script mainBuild.xml. This mainBuild.xml needs to invoke several other build files, but (and here’s the catch) you want the sub-builds to use a different JDK. Using the ant task will invoke the sub-build using the [...]
What problem does it solve?
Posted by Mark in CMCrossroads, Tools 'n' Tips on March 8, 2011
This simple question will save you hours of pain. Whenever you are looking at a new methodology or technology. Whenever you are designing a new process or procedure. Ask yourself, ‘what problem does it solve?’. If you can’t come up with a clear well defined answer then the chances are you should not proceed with [...]
Conversations and workshops
Posted by Mark in Body of Knowledge, CMCrossroads, General, ITSLM, Plain Old Blog, Principia Notifications, Tools 'n' Tips on December 10, 2010
I have, for some time, considered the possibilities of the Internet for the real-time exchange of ideas around the lifecycle management subject (config, change, release, problem, and project management, among others). In particular I have been pondering how to start a useful dialogue about the Lifecycle Management Body of Knowledge. I suspect that one of [...]
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 [...]
How do you copy 60m files?
Posted by Mark in CMCrossroads, General, Tools 'n' Tips on September 25, 2010
It is a problem you are bound to face sooner or later in your CM career, How do you copy 60m files?. Okay, you may not need to copy 60 million files, but anyone who has tried to copy millions of files between servers knows that it can be fraught with problems, especially if those [...]
Is Perl an essential skill of SCMers
Posted by Mark in CMCrossroads, Glue Software, PERL, Plain Old Blog, Tools 'n' Tips on September 21, 2010
Is being able to use Perl an essential skill for people working at the technical coal face of software configuration management? The obvious, and probably correct, answer is ‘probably not essential‘ but if you work in software configuration management it is well worth considering. Perl is fairly ubiquitous, there are few platforms that do not [...]
Which SCM tool?
Posted by Mark in Business Cases, CMCrossroads, General, Plain Old Blog, Process on September 8, 2010
This is one of the most common questions asked on the CMCrossroads forums, and perhaps one of the most pointless. The question is variously stated as, “which is the best tool?”, “is tool X better than tool Y?”, or “we are looking for the best tool to X”. All such questions are equally vacuous. The [...]
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 [...]
