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

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.

I’m very excited about our 5.2 release! We’ve completed the move to PostgreSQL on the back end, fully internationalized our products, and added a slew of new features, like per-element security so that you can lock down certain files or directories to specific groups or users.

In addition to moving to PostgreSQL, we’ve taken advantage of its capabilities to increase performance in a few key areas such as update, especially when using cross-links, populate, and more. And as a first step towards fully embracing 64bit servers, we now support 64bit CPUs on Linux servers. You can look forward to additional performance boosts as we exploit the capabilities of PostgreSQL in the future.

Haven’t upgraded in a while? Check out what else is new! To get a full flavor of all of the new functionality we’ve added recently, check out recent webinar which highlights what’s new.

If you haven’t tried our plug-ins in a while, we’ve put out new releases of our Eclipse and Visual Studio plug-ins for all versions of AccuRev. Eclipse and Visual Studio plug-ins will work with older releases, so no need to wait for 5.2 to start benefiting from the new features in the plug-ins.

We’ve fully integrated the Web UI into the plug-ins so you can now use all of the following functionality: version browser, annotate, stream browser, and all of AccuWork. Also, in 5.2 you can now access the Web UI with a single click from most screens. For instance, if you want to send somebody a URL of a file or diff, you can just click the “copy to clipboard” button in the toolbar and then compose an e-mail to somebody and paste in the URL. When they click the URL, they will go right to that file or diff. And the Web UI now allows you to print any table that it supports.

While we are in the process of making the new functionality in the Web UI available in all of our UIs, this is a great first step to quickly link to the new functionality.

A Few More Details on What’s Available Via the Web UI
If you haven’t used the Web UI or are using an older version, you may not have heard that there is an entirely new version browser in the Web UI and for AccuWork users- AccuWork on the Web has been completely revamped. For instance, it is easy to search by keyword and you can do drag and drop query editing.

5.3 and Beyond… Here We Come!
The database and internationalization are two very important infrastructure changes which will accelerate both our engineering velocity as well as our market penetration. With our upcoming 5.3 release we will be re-introducing our quarterly pace of releases as we had with our 4.8 and 4.9 releases. With the switch to PostgreSQL and an internationalized code base complete, you will see the release of new functionality faster than ever before. In preparation for 5.3 and beyond, we’ve just launched a new product survey as one of the many ways we collect product priorities. Make sure to look for it and fill it out. It is one of the best ways to have a significant impact on our product roadmap. If you haven’t gotten an e-mail yet, you may not be in our survey database. Just ask your AccuRev administrator for a link.

I mentioned on this blog last week that AccuRev had big news coming that would mark the next phase in the evolution of SCM – the first big leap since AccuRev introduced the stream-based approach. Well, the big news has arrived with this week’s launch of AccuRev SCM Version 5.2. AccuRev Version 5.2 arms developers with one of the few SCM solutions on the market today that offers streams and enhanced enterprise performance, reporting, security, and scalability through the postgreSQL relational database we’ve embedded into our system.

With this release, AccuRev has also introduced AccuWorkflow 2.0, a collaborative process-centric governance tool that enables automation and compliance with an issue-based lifecycle workflow directly within AccuRev. AccuWorkflow is especially valuable for developers of software solutions for highly regulated industries such as financial services with its stringent requirements for SOX compliance.

AccuRev 5.2 is available immediately.  Check out the press release here  for more details, or see us demo 5.2 at Agile 2011.   You can also check out a brief podcast we put together that examines the major issues and challenges today’s enterprise developers face and how we’ve attempted to help solve those challenges with AccuRev 5.2.  Click here to listen in.

For more info, check out What’s New in 5.2.

In a recent post I talked about branching and merging, and offered some tips on how to avoid development nightmares involved with these procedures.

An integral part of the solution I cited is stream branching, which easily accepts parent code while allowing developers to then push code out to other streams. This makes merging easier because the entire file change history is available and automatically tracked.

Streams have been an important step in advancing software configuration management (SCM) technologies and processes. Now, with software development growing more complex seemingly by the day, the time has come for the next phase of more robust SCM solutions.

Between globally distributed teams, emerging methodologies such as Agile, and market demands for faster, better and more cost-effective software, there is great demand for enterprise developers to better manage all of their activities. In addition, industries such as financial services and healthcare face the added complexity of compliance with regulations such as SOX and HIPAA.

I’m excited about some big news we’ll be announcing next week around these challenges. What AccuRev is announcing will be a major step forward both for our clients and the software development industry – it really is the next leap forward for SCM solutions.

I can’t reveal too many details at this point, but stay tuned for more details coming soon – on this blog and the news wires!

Are you frequently called on to perform the daunting task of ‘the merge’? Does tension mount and do groans grow louder when it’s time for a merge?  Are only a select few are willing to stand up and do the work?

Maybe these stages describe your merge process:

1. Denial: It’s never going to work (in a timely manner).
2. Anger: Why do I have to do the merge?
3. Bargaining: I’ll work on maintenance and support if I don’t have to do the merge.
4. Depression: How many compiler errors? Why won’t the jsp work with firefox?
5. Acceptance: Not really, it’s compiling and (mostly) passing tests.

Before we try to get you through the 5 stages of merge, let’s a take a look at divergence, the cause of a complicated merge.

Converging Divergence

There are lots of reasons for divergence, and as many for merge product lines back together.

Maybe you’re delivering functionality to specific customers, creating customization and personalization of websites, internationalizing your product, even moving from Windows to Linux platforms. So what happens? These areas diverge, developers refactor code, and the product lines look very, very different over time. Sure, you try to propagate changes across the product lines, but each implementation is slightly different. Eventually you realize this is a maintenance nightmare, and some shared areas should be brought back in line (if not the whole product line moving to a single source).

Now comes the hard part. A select few of your developers have to start piecing the code back together. Determining what changes are acceptable, reviewing the functionality, and hopefully getting the appropriate test coverage to verify that the desired changes have been brought back into a single (or at least cleaner) product line. Here’s where tools really shine (or falter).

Now, I consider myself pretty experienced in the merge department. I’ve worked on a number of merges of different sizes, dealt with multiple languages (English/Italian), and even migrated to different platforms (Moving from Windows to Macintosh).  Sometimes, I found, tools were a complete hindrance- I remember back in the day, using PVCS or CVS was every man for himself. You just got it working, never mind worrying about who made what code decision, and hopefully extensive tests identified the problems. More modern tools, AccuRev in particular, give you another dimension with merge that I find to be an essential.

The Merge Master

AccuRev version tracking, and the changes it tracks (content, name, removal) really help in hunting down the straightforward changes that can result in truly subtle changes in product behavior. Simply knowing that files have been removed in one product, and merging those changes over with a click of a button can eliminate behavior that is hard to determine, especially when the developer doing the merge had a reasonable belief that the files may exist.

Even better, large or midsize merges, can be easily reviewed, grouped into areas of the code and dealt with in a manageable manner. I performed a merge that merged internationalization changes into a product at AccuRev. There were over 7000 files that were altered, added or removed that needed to be managed.

Simply grouping the files by directory structure quickly identified which were doc, help, client, java, etc. Then these areas could be dealt with by developers in the specific areas. Further, because AccuRev performs simple merges quickly, I was able to perform the initial merges in these areas without having a strong need to understand them, and leave the complex changes to those who specialized in particular areas. This further reduced the amount of effort (and pain) that other team members experienced.

In this 7000+ file example, only about 400 files actually required more specialized investigation. And of the 400, only about 50 had truly complex changes where both sides of the merge made what looked like contrary decisions. Here is another place where AccuRev shines. By looking at the changes made at different points in each of the product lines, and working with change packages that described what the developers where trying to accomplish, I was able to make intelligent decisions about how the code should integrate, instead of just picking ‘he who changed it last’.

The two product lines in this case had diverged for about 9 months, and had about 10 developers making changes in each product line. Even with the amount of changes that occurred over this time period, it only took a single developer about 2 weeks time to bring the two product lines together. It took only a couple of days to complete the initial code process, walking through the changes and picking (via the AccuRev GUI) which of the changes to take, and editing inline where it was obvious.

During the first week, we were able to finish digging around developer changes via the AccuRev version browser in order to help resolve initial compilation failures. This work brought the product to the point where it was compiling on multiple platforms (which is usually even a problem with nightly builds). After another week of going through the validation and user tests, the merge was stable enough to be considered the baseline for the next release. Of course development had already occurred during the two weeks that the merge process took, but with the version tracking AccuRev performs with merges, it became almost trivial to bring in the new changes- within 1 day they were validated and ready to be the new baseline.

Sounds like acceptance to me.

It occurred to me recently how much emphasis is put on the need for an Agile Project Management tool as you begin to adopt and expand the use of Agile in your development environment.  While many, including myself, would argue that using post-it notes and physical story boards are the best ways to start and Agile pilot team (since I believe it instills good habits, like circling the team around a common goal) there is certainly a place for Agile Project Management as you begin to expand Agile within a larger organization.  Agile Project Management provides visibility across the development lifecycle and into teams spanning multiple time zones, allowing for a big picture view of the project.

User Stories are the Key

Driving development through the use of User Stories is often considered a determining characteristic of whether a shop is considered Agile or not.  And while I won’t go into the details here, it is important to have a ‘place’ to manage those user stories in a backlog.   It’s also important to be able to see and report which iteration the user story is assigned to, and the current status of a particular story.  Has it been scheduled for an iteration?  Have we started development on it?  Who’s working on it? Etc…

Understanding the state and status of user stories that are in development is crucial to accurately reporting the current state of an iteration as a whole.  If you are going to use burndown charts to know how many hours of work are left for an iteration, or a burnup chart to determine how many points are left to be accepted for an iteration, you are going to need accurate information.  Accurate data comes from updating user stories and tasks on a timely basis so you always have the freshest information.

How Accurate is Your Information?

One aspect of user stories that is often overlooked is the linkage between the user stories within an active iteration and the location of the actual code changes for those particular stories.  If you only have an accurate view of the stories from a development standpoint, but you have no idea where the code for that story is, then all of the information in your project management tool contains incomplete data.

Under more traditional development methodologies, the time to ‘check’ the linkage between closed issues and code that was changed in order to complete said closed issues happens on an infrequent basis.  Checking the linkage usually occurs toward the end of a long development cycle, when teams are getting close to a release point.  If we are executing on a 6 month release cycle, it probably won’t occur until 4 months in.

Identifying the status and locating the code for user stories happens weekly on an Agile team, regardless of the iteration length.  This requires you to have quick access to accurate information to track those stories from a development perspective.

Accurate Information… Quickly

In many traditional SCM systems, developers must manually indicate the linkage between the code and the story it is associated with as the code is checked in. At the end of the iteration, teams must determine what stories are fully completed and what stories are only partially done, and need to be retargeted to the next sprint.

Traceability and visibility into each story is necessary to see where code changes are located. The ability to easily associate code modifications with a user story will eliminate error prone manual linkage problems. In AccuRev, this information is stored in a Change Package, or a deep linkage between the user story that is related to project management and code. Change Packages can be tracked through the development cycle.  This gives developers visibility into the status of an individual user story without additional overhead, while providing traceability to Scrum Masters and Product Owners into the status of an iteration with increased accuracy.

Dr. Dobb’s announced this year’s Jolt Productivity Awards, and AccuRev’s AgileCycle, the Application Lifecycle Management suite, was named a winner!  AccuRev’s AgileCycle won the Jolt Productivity Award #2 for Change and Configuration Management tools.

Jolt judge Mike Riley says “AgileCycle embodies the depth of expertise and understanding of how developers working on projects, large or small, need to effectively communicate and manage change.”

Thanks Dr. Dobb’s, and way to go team AgileCycle!

AccuRev is sponsoring a brand new Agile event with Eliassen Group, Agile Journal and Rally Software- Incorporating Agile into Your Organization- a breakfast panel discussion that focuses on maximizing the ROI of Agile methodologies throughout your company.

We invite you to join us in answering the common questions:

‘What is Agile?,’ ‘How can you help Agile permeate through your organization?‘ and ‘Where is the ROI within Agile development?‘

Date & Time:
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010
7:30AM – 10:30AM

Location:
Boston Marriott Burlington Hotel
One Burlington Mall Road
Burlington, Massachusetts 01803 USA

Cost:
$50/person registration fee – each attendee will receive a $50 Amazon gift card at the event.

Agile Event Agenda

7:30 AM   Registration and Breakfast

8:00 AM   Panel Discussion- What is Agile?

8:15 AM   Panel Discussion- How can you help Agile permeate through your organization?

8:45 AM   Networking Break

9:15  AM   Panel Discussion- Where is the ROI?

10:00 AM  Q&A

10:30 AM  Closing and Rafflle

It’s going to be a great event, we hope to see you there!

This event is over. For more events visit: http://www.accurev.com/events.html

Our Agile Comes to You seminar tour with AnthillPro and Rally is starting to wind down, with only 1 more seminar to go in this round!  (Check out our events page for more information.)   It’s been a very successful tour thus far, we have answered a lot of your questions about Agile adoption and Agile pain points, worked with some great presenters, and met a lot of Agile enthusiasts.

Check out what attendees are saying about Agile Comes to You, read a presenter’s point of view about a recent seminar, or follow #Agile2U on Twitter.

Agile Comes to You is brought to you by:



Missed the seminars?  Here are a few more events you might be interested in: http://www.accurev.com/events.html