Software Configuration Management and Agile Software Development

Archive for the ‘SCM Resources’ category

Software Release Management: Ensuring Reliable, Reproducible Software Products

October 25th, 2011 by clucca

As the software development process has evolved over the past couple of years – particularly enterprise software development – one aspect of software configuration management has drawn increasing attention as a means for controlling risk and maximizing success rates. Of course, I’m talking about software release management.

What is software release management?

It’s the practice of doing all the builds for the various aspects of a project and then moving all those builds to its particular process – development to QA to user acceptance to production to deployment.

What’s made software release management crucial to efficient and timely software development is the use of parallel and geographically dispersed development teams. What was once a pretty straightforward, linear process has now become a major, multi-tasking effort as engineering teams work concurrently on various aspects and features of a product that then need to be merged into a single main trunkline for QA, production, and eventual release to the marketplace.

Compounding this release management challenge are additional issues such as:

error correction
additional customer feature requests
risk management
product revisions
manufacturing issues
general software entropy over time

As a result, the release manager function was developed to deal with all these challenges – a sort of software release management superhero. Part overseer, architect, coordinator and support engineer, the release manager is expected to have a general, transparent view of the entire project development process along with a granular view of every aspect of it. Never mind real-time issue and code change tracking, along with the ability to head off error propagation and broken builds. How can any one person manage to accomplish all this?

The best answer? With a software release management tool that provides a stream architecture, or something that can be described as “intelligent branching.” Streams are ideal configuration objects because they contain absolutely everything associated with any particular release, making it easy to track the history of the release and merge any changes with minimal (if any) errors. In fact, streams make it easy to dial back the clock and return to virtually any version of a release to quickly and effectively handle any errors that might pop up.

What makes this type of tool particularly useful is the way it helps release managers handle all the important aspects of software production, including build stabilization, QA testing hand-offs, product assessments, and archiving activities, to name a few. In short, software release management makes it really easy to move new builds to any one of the configurations needed in the software development and release process.

Some of the major features of our software release management tool include:

Use of streams to store and make available complete code files for all release versions
AccuRev TimeSafe architecture for atomic application of all code changes to minimize errors
Integrated issue tracking
Improved developer productivity

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Posted in AccuRev, SCM Resources, version control

Tags: AccuRev software release management

The Holiday Season is Already Here for Software Development Teams in the Travel Industry

September 30th, 2011 by AccuRev

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The holidays are still several months away, but for software development teams in the travel industry, the “hustle and bustle” of the season is already here.

If you think about the ways you make your business or personal travel plans today, you’ll begin to appreciate the increasingly complex software development challenges travel websites present – and the importance of advanced SCM tools.

Just 10 or 15 years ago, many of us were still making travel arrangements through an agent – on the phone or in-person. We may have gone online to check out a hotel and moved to another site to check on flights – and yet another to rent a car.

Today, travel websites like Kayak and Orbitz bring together all these consumer options and more – and others include frequent flyer miles, preferred guest points and other information related to our travel plans, often involving outside partners. All of these variables are changing rapidly and are updated dynamically and in real time on travel websites. This places greater demands on software development teams – teams that are increasingly distributed across multiple time zones and locations.

Also important to note is that the changes and updates these teams are called on to make are increasingly “business-critical.” A software glitch or a site crash can result in major revenue losses, not to mention the residual consumer frustration and damage to the brand.

More variables, more frequent updates and a more business-critical focus — now magnify all this during the many times of peak travel or weather-related interruptions and one begins to understand why more advanced SCM tools are required in the travel industry today.

Basic software development tools may have been fine for some organizations in travel — smaller airlines or hotels with more basic informational web sites that aren’t designed to process high volume reservations and transactions. But such basic sites are becoming a rarity in the travel industry, leading more and more travel and hospitality businesses to turn to more advanced software development solutions.

AccuRev’s SCM solutions are designed to handle today’s most complex software development challenges, which explains the growth we’re seeing in travel and hospitality business customers.

So when the holidays draw near and you go online to book a hotel, schedule a flight or rent a car, you can thank all of those software developers that have been working hard behind the scenes to make sure the site is up and running 24/7.

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Posted in AccuRev, Requirements, SCM Resources, version control

Tags: AccuRev complex SCM Software Configuration Management software development teams version control

Learning From eCommerce Failures – and Successes

September 20th, 2011 by clucca

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Mammoth retailer Target must have had very high hopes for big sales when a new designer collection went on sale last week. Unfortunately it ended up being a bust. (The site quickly became overwhelmed and crashed several times throughout the day.) Online retail experts say losses for the retailer could run into the millions as a result.

Scenarios like this are not new, though with a large retailer like Target, it was somewhat surprising. The painful reality of eCommerce is when transactional websites experience dramatically increased traffic, there is always a chance that, without well maintained software development measures in place, crash scenarios like Target’s will occur.

When an eCommerce crisis like this occurs, developers go into fire drill mode to make rapid changes so the site is back up and running as quickly as possible. Software change and configuration management tools play a crucial role in both ongoing updates and crisis management updates, like the Target example.

It’s also important to note that traditional SCM tools won’t cut it when it comes to high volume transaction web sites like Target, Amazon or any major retailer. Most retail and eCommerce sites need enterprise SCM tools that can scale to accommodate large, geographically distributed teams of developers working in parallel. More advanced SCM tools are integral to the success of transactional web sites, both from a day-to-day aspect, and when there are spikes in traffic and transactions for special sales events, promotions, and holiday shopping.

While last week’s incident demonstrated what can go wrong when an eCommerce site experiences significant problems, there are some great stories out there as well.

One such example is that of a very large and well known travel eCommerce site that receives an average of ten million visitors a month.

As with most of the top of travel eCommerce sites, this one is very dynamic. Users can make reservations for airlines, car rental, hotels, sign up for text message alerts about delayed flights, rate their own experiences and much more.

While these features are popular with consumers, these transactional environments are highly complex to manage. At this particular website, there are as many as 40 different development teams working on 40 different projects. One “project” might be car rentals, another hotel reservations, etc.

When development environments have this much complexity, when teams are working in parallel on a wide variety of projects, only the most powerful SCM tools can help minimize version control problems that lead to bugs slipping through. What may appear at first to be a minor issue can, in the worst case scenario, cause an array of site problems and crashes that have a direct impact on the consumer and revenue. This travel site, which uses AccuRev’s SCM solution, is able to do everything possible to ensure the site and the software behind it stay up and running smoothly, 24/7.

The web storefront is a business critical tool for any type of eCommerce business. For these reasons, enterprise level SCM tools under the hood are essential to success.

What other similar success and web crisis/failure stories have you experienced directly or heard about?