SNESCM

Scandinavian Network of Excellence
in
Software Configuration Management

Presentation abstracts:

Breaking down the barriers to SCM renewal (Knud Poulsen):
It is often difficult for an organisation to renew its SCM tooling, even when the potential productivity and efficiency gains are compelling. What organisational, psychological and technical factors stand in the way of SCM change, and what arguments and techniques are effective for moving forward?
SCM tools sit at the very heart of the software development process, literally bringing together all the pieces of the software puzzle. Changing such tools is understandably shrouded with great uncertainty and doubt. The experience I would like to convey in this talk is that making such change is actually fairly easy (when done right), and in most cases yields absolutely incredible overnight productivity and quality gains.

Massive Multi User Regression Tests (Joachim Nilsson):
Test Automation and Software Configuration Management in marriage. When the 'One-Branch' strategy no longer works due to complex features and overlapping releases, how do we make sure that the quality per branch does not degrade? How do we run all regression tests for all branches in parallel? The presentation shows an example of how to implement multiple branch testing using a server pool, Jenkins and Groovy scripts.

Co-ordination in the Absence of Communication (Lars Bendix):
On a software development project many people collaborate to build a product contributing different pieces of the final product. Often people on a development team will work in parallel, either on different parts or on the same parts of the product, and will have to co-ordinate their work with other people on the team.
When teams are virtual this co-ordination becomes more difficult since there are obstacles to direct and immediate communication caused by distribution of people in distance or time. This often gives rise to changes and contributions that are conflicting or do not work properly together right away. In this presentation, we investigate different co-ordination problems and analyse how little and what type of communication is needed for good co-ordination in different situations. We also suggest ways of working with (processes) configuration management tools that can make it easier to co-ordinate contributions in the absence of easy communication.

'Logistic challenge between the IT islands' - Globalisation and the digital challenge (René Schaap):
For different reasons organisations choose to outsource many parts of their activities. Nobody have doubts about increased efficiency and cost benefits when organisations outsource their cleaning, catering and removal activities. Most heard reason is that organisations don't want to keep these cost-sucking non-business-related trades in their own hands. During the last decade ICT trades are more and more compared with these non-ICT-related trades and consequently several of these activities like data centre operations and software design & development are outsourced. Since a few years it is also not uncommon to outsource the quality & testing activities to independent organisations. This trend continues and in the near future all main Software Development Life Cycle activities will be outsourced. The control and governance activities are the ones remain. The consequence is that end-to-end IT (requirements, design, development, testing, operations) covers many different companies.
Are you ready to control all these different IT islands in the future? Are you ready if you are one of these IT islands? What is the role of release management, configuration management and how should the trigger processes like change and defect management evolve? This presentation will address some of the challenges we will have the coming years.

A Day in the Life of an SCM Person (Christian Pendleton):
The best part of working with CM is that you can work with major strategies for a whole company and on the very same day configure build jobs and create release notes for the latest product release. I will talk about my view of the optimal CM role and how it may appear on a regular day as an agile CM consultant.