- is different, and teams themselves change over time, it's important to review how you are working, and figure out which practices are working for you and which are not. Retrospectives are a key agile development practice, but they aren't just for agile developers. Periodically make a list of the things about your SCM and Release process that seemed to be working well, and which need improvement.
Recap and Resources
While in an ideal world you'd do everything on this list on day 1, you might have practical roadblocks to doing that, so we broke the list into parts....
To learn more, here are some resources we like:
Practices to use for small team SCM and their rationale: SCM Patterns Book (Berczuk, S. P. and B. Appleton, 2003). Software Configuration Management Patterns : Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration. (Boston, Addison-Wesley.)
Deployment: (Jez Humble's book) Humble, J. and D. Farley (2010). Continuous Delivery : Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation. (Upper Saddle River, NJ, Addison-Wesley).
Retrospectives: Agile Project Retrospectives. Derby, E. and D. Larsen (2006). Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great. (Raleigh, NC, Pragmatic Bookshelf).
Unit Testing: XUnit Patterns (Meszaros, G., 2007). xUnit test patterns : Refactoring Test Code. (Upper Saddle River, NJ, Addison-Wesley.)
CI Practices and Approaches: Continuous Integration. (Duvall, P. M., S. Matyas, et al., 2007). Continuous Integration : Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk. (Upper Saddle River, NJ, Addison-Wesley.)
You'll find that some of these books overlap in content a bit. This is because it takes an assortment of practices to collaborate effectively. On a small team you have the advantage of easier communication. Use that to your advantage to simplify your process, but don't underestimate the value of process in making communication easier.
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About the author
Brad Appleton is a software CM/ALM solution architect and lean/agile development champion at a large telecommunications company. Currently he helps projects and teams adopt and apply lean/agile development and CM/ALM practices and tools. He is coauthor of the bookSoftware Configuration Management Patterns, a columnist in The CM Journal and The Agile Journal at CMCrossroads.com, and a former section editor for The C++ Report. You can read Brad's blog at blog.bradapp.net.
About the author
Steve Berczuk is an engineer and ScrumMaster at Humedica where he's helping to build next-generation SaaS-based clinical informatics applications. The author of Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration, he is a recognized expert in software configuration management and agile software development. Steve is passionate about helping teams work effectively to produce quality software. He has an M.S. in operations research from Stanford University and an S.B. in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and is a certified, practicing ScrumMaster. Contact Steve at steve@berczuk.com or visit berczuk.com and follow his blog at blog.berczuk.com.
About the author
Robert Cowham has long been interested in software configuration management while retaining the attitude of a generalist with experience and skills in many aspects of software development. A regular presenter at conferences, he authored the Agile SCM column within the CM Journal together with Brad Appleton and Steve Berczuk. His day job is as Services Director for Square Mile Systems whose main focus is on skills and techniques for infrastructure configuration management and DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) - applying configuration management principles to hardware documentation and implementation as well as mapping ITIL services to the underlying layers.
