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April 22, 2007

Brad Appleton
Brad Appleton's ACME Blog is about »
» April CM Journal and LDM

The April issue of the CM Journal, and there is a FANTASTIC article in it by Austin Hastings about his Longacre Deployment Management strategy for dealing with database CM. It's long, but well worth the read for the insight into a new way of thinking about and doing CM of a database.

The April CM Basics issue has a companion/predecessor article a Case Study: Enterprise and Database CM the describes the initial problem, motivation and challenges that the LDM approach needed to solve. The LDM article goes into the gory technical details of the solution.

by Brad Appleton at 8:51 AM under change-tracking , cm , version-control
April 7, 2007

Brad Appleton
Brad Appleton's ACME Blog is about »
» Lean-based Metrics for Agile CM Environments

My paper in this month's issue of The CM Journal is about Lean-based Metrics for Agile CM Environments.

    This month we take an "Agile" slant on metrics for CM, including the CM process itself. Agility is supposed to be people-centric and value-driven. So any metrics related to agility should, at least in theory, provide some indication of the performance & effectiveness of the value-delivery system, and how well it supports the people collaborating to produce that value. We borrow heavily from the concepts of Lean Production (and a little from the Theory of Constraints, a.k.a. TOC). Let's see where it takes us ....
Some readers will recognize some of the content from earlier blog-postings of mine on Codeline Flow, Availability and Throughput, Nested Synchronization and Harmonic Cadences and Feedback, Flow and Friction, but there is also a lot more content there too!

by Brad Appleton at 11:00 AM under agile , change-tracking , cm , lean , version-control
January 21, 2007

Brad Appleton
Brad Appleton's ACME Blog is about »
» Agile Tooling Survey Results

From Pete Behrens' Agile Executive Blog, the results to the Agile Tooling Survey they conducted in October are now available online at http://trailridgeconsulting.com/surveys.html:

    With over 500 survey responses from 39 countries, we feel this survey
    provides an excellent benchmark for where the agile movement is at
    today and how we are using project management tooling to assist our
    agile processes.

    This report builds a corporate profile of companies that are following
    agile processes today and then uses that profile to analyze how they
    are using project management tooling to support various aspects of
    their agile processes.

It's rather interesting to see what sorts of tools are being used for version-control, defect/issue/enhancement-tracking (DIET), and project planning & tracking, particularly when some high-profile Agilists would have us believe that (other than version control) Agile should "eschew" such tools.

I don't think the problem is the tools. I think the problem is most of them were/are made and used in a non-agile fashion that didn't have the agile way of working in mind. Now that there are some tools out there which do, it seems they are helpful after all :-)

by Brad Appleton at 7:53 PM under agile , change-tracking , project-mgmt , tools , version-control