CM: THE NEXT GENERATION of Build Management

CM tool should be able to help track the states of deployments.By extending the ALM functions to track deployment sites and their states (i.e. what revisions of software/data do they currently have deployed), CM tools can add a generic capability that is often difficult to manage or is relagted to CRM applications.Deployment site tracking might take the form of a customer tracking system, or of a server tracking system.Flexibility in the ability to extend the ALM tool without a lot of effort is a key capability that is visible in some tools already, noteably the Canadian tools:MKS and CM+.

This level of deployment management is crucial to managing support teams.If customers/servers/whatever can be upgraded to the most recent releases/deployments, support calls and expertice requirements become much more uniform.Having the ability to identify stragglers (using old releases) and to focus on moving them forward will ultimately benefit the support teams and the bottom line.

Overall, my preference is to deal with build management through strong tool capabilities, and to deal with deployment management in a case-by-case basis using scripting in cooperation to the data management capabilities of a CM tool.When I see a tool that allows me to scroll through products and then to scroll through builds within a given product stream, while presenting me with all of the traceability information, my interest grows.This is the beginning of a new way of looking at CM - instead of having to dig out information, it's all there.I just have to name to product and stream and scroll through until I see what I'm looking for.A far cry from the days when a build was simply a tag on a set of file revisions.