Agile SCM January 2007 - Looking Back to Move Forward

an emphasis on Agile-friendly tools that are light, fast, and minimally invasive. The most well known/liked ones in the Agile community seem to be Jira, VersionOne, Scrum Works , RallyDev, and TargetProcess (Microsoft also has MSF for Agile as well as MSF for Scrum).

Event-Based Traceability

Collaboration Frameworks and their integrations with IDEs, such as those provided by MS VSTS, IBM Rational Jazz, and CollabNet, have now made this not only a possibility, but relatively convenient to do. On the other hand, among researchers another method of traceability is becoming more popular. It is sometimes called discovery-based, query-based, or "Just Google it" traceability. It is a form of traceless traceability, where smart probabilistic search engines with some syntactic and semantic "knowledge" can search thru a project based on terms and keywords. It does require using a consistent (and documented) vocabulary throughout the project. Still, it can be greatly enhanced with event-based mechanisms. So I would still say look for this trend to start picking up due to VSTS and Jazz.

 SCM and Requirements Repository Integration/Unification
This is another area where there have been some rumblings, but not as much as expected (similar to integration with content management). Some next generation requirements tools are sporting Eclipse integration, but we've seen little in the area of tighter integration between requirements and code in a single (possibly virtually unified) repository. The use of Wikis/Mashups, and Wiki-like content management systems for managing requirements (and project/process) knowledge does seem to be on the rise.

 Lean Traceability
There have been a few rumblings and strides in this area, but there's a lot of talk/desire, and occasional presentations of techniques used, very little in the way of automated support for this.

 Full Application Lifecycle Management
This one is almost unavoidable. Certainly if you believe all the marketing hype, it has happened. In reality, we probably still have a ways to go, but the attention certainly seems to be there.

Enterprise CM Integration Architecture & Enterprise Data Management/Warehouses
This does seem to be happening to the extent that it is spurred on by the likes of ITIL and CobIT. The tool-sets for this seem very different from those dealing with SCM and there doesn't seem to be much integration between them yet. Despite some vendors claiming to be truly enterprise class CMDBs, a true CMDB seems to be a "holy grail" quest of sorts. Systems like VSTS and Rational Jazz do seem to have some nice data warehousing & reporting capabilities, so we do expect to see more in this area.

 

The Rise of COBIT
Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT®) provides good practices across a domain and process framework and presents activities in a manageable and logical structure. COBIT’s good practices represent the consensus of experts. They are strongly focused on control and less on execution. The business orientation of COBIT consists of linking business goals to IT goals, providing metrics and maturity models to measure their achievement, and identifying the associated responsibilities of business and IT process owners. For IT to be successful in delivering against business requirements, management should put an internal control system or framework in place. The COBIT control framework contributes to these needs by:

• Making a link to the business requirements
• Organising IT activities into a generally accepted process model

• Identifying the major IT resources to be leveraged

• Defining the management control objectives to be considered

Companies are successfully putting together frameworks with COBIT at the top using ITIL and CMMI for lower level best practices and execution.

What did we miss?
So that