Developer March

OFF THE PRESS

CollabNet Intends to Become No.1 in Agile ALM by Acquiring Danube Enterprise consolidation is the order of the day and here is another piece...

Micro Focus Integrates Visual Studio 2010 in Cobol Tools Micro Focus has announced four new Cobol products to allow developers to...

ODA Open Design Alliance Announces DWGdirect.NET Beta Release The Open Design Alliance (ODA) announces the beta release of DWGdirect.NET,...

WHITE PAPERS

Hot and Safe: a Beginner's Guide to Multithreaded Libraries Most of the discussion of multithreading that emerges from Cilk Arts is...

8 Simple Rules for Designing Threaded Applications Multithreaded programming is still more art than science. This white paper...

Maximizing Digital Media Application Performance using Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives in Microsoft* .NET* Environment Microsoft .NET framework's interoperability mechanisms can be used to create...

Business Technology Summit 2010 on SOA and Cloud Computing

EXCLUSIVES

CA, Microsoft, IBM and CollabNet Lock Horns in the Change & Configuration Management Tools Category

Configuration Management is about managing configurations. Simply put, this means identifying the configuration and managing the changes that surround it. Managing changes to the configuration broadly falls under the domain of change control. A good change control process and tool set will help ensure that only the most appropriate changes are being made to a product. A robust process of this kind will also give the team easy access to all configurations and change data, including full traceability information.

Tool support for change and configuration control has evolved quite a bit over the decades. Initially it started as the ability to have an exclusive lock on a file when you checked it out - this was the "state-of-the-art" as the '60s moved into the '70s. The concept of change packages, or updates, introduced progressively through the '70s, '80s and '90s, were instrumental in moving change control along. Of course, we've come a long way since then. Change control must begin far earlier in the cycle than code changes.

A significant portion of IT related news this last decade has been dominated by mergers and acquisitions. Most notable in the areas of configuration and change management are the acquisitions of both Rational and Telelogic by IBM. One of the new players, AccuRev, has grabbed a number of converts. At the same time Subversion has captured significant Open Source interest. CollabNet’s enterprise focused offering of Subversion has become widely popular and recently Subversion has been accepted into the Apache Incubator, a first step in becoming a top-level project of the Apache Software Foundation.

Microsoft representative thanks the developer ecosystem as he accepts the award on behalf of the VSTS team at Great Indian Developer Awards 2008

When one thinks of Enterprise CM, three things come to mind:

Tools (and processes) that expand configuration management from the software team to the product team
Processes (and standards) that help keep configuration management consistent across the enterprise
Infrastructure (and management) that pushes configuration management technology into the rest of the organization.

Enterprise configuration management is not a simple feature, process or edict. It is the establishment of tools, processes and infrastructure so that the management can confidently reap the benefits of change and configuration management as well as application lifestyle management (ALM) across the enterprise.

One of the big problems is that organizations often dictate a tool to be used across the enterprise. A vast majority of the time, the wrong tool is mandated resulting in budget crunches, resource crunches and capability shortfalls.

Establishing an enterprise-wide tool requires understanding the CM/ALM process across the Enterprise, and then selecting tools that can be used to support an overall process and framework. This requires expertise and experience. One project is not the same as another. An Agile project which is delivering a constant stream of releases to stay ahead of the competition is much different than an infrastructure project which is occasionally upgrading repository technology. A development team of 3 or 4 is much different than one of 300 to 400. Yet these variations exist in any large corporation.

Anil Bakshi, Country Head, India, Collabnet, receiving the award on behalf of the CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise Edition team at Great Indian Developer Awards 2009

Saltmarch Media's annual Great Indian Developer Awards honors software products across 12 categories, based on their productivity, innovation excellence, universal usefulness, simplicity, functionality and most importantly on the ground feedback from India’s software developer ecosystem. In the Change and Configuration Management tools Category, the final shortlist consists of CA Software Change Manager, Microsoft’s System Centre Configuration Manager, IBM’S Rational Software Architect, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System 2008 and CollabNet’s SubVersion. Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System was the first product to win in this category in 2008 followed by CollabNet’s SourceForge Enterprise Edition in the 2009 chapter of the same awards.

If there is a particular change and configuration management tool that you personally endorse to your colleagues or you evangelize about them at the first opportunity you get, here is your chance to vote for it (voting closes April 10 2010) and see it win this prestigious award. Who knows? You could win along with it too. At the end of the voting process, a lucky draw will be conducted and one person will receive a surprise gift from our prize sponsor. So visit the 2010 Great Indian Developer Awards website and cast your vote. It counts!

VIDEOS

The Entire Game Should Move Onto the GPU, says Rev Lebaredian As the computing functionality and horsepower of GPUs has grown over the last few years, the role of the GPU is rapidly expanding to game tasks beyond rasterization-based graphics. Now...

PODCAST&VIDEOS

SOA with SQL Server A key component to any distributed architecture built with SOA methodologies in mind is the database infrastructure. Service Oriented Database Architecture (SODA) is much easier to...

A Lap Around Visual Studio Team System Wonder why 70% of projects are classified as failed projects? Working in silos does not help projects succeed. Learn how Visual Studio Team System 2008 helps break the walls across team...

Busting Common Myths about Developer Productivity Many traditional assumptions about software development have been challenged in recent years. Agile processes and service oriented architectures are two examples of this. An area that has...

.NET Gotchas Workshop by Venkat Subramaniam: Part III Programmers working on the .NET framework know the power and increased productivity that comes with it, says Dr. Venkat Submramaniam. Like any development, however, there are things that...

Silverlight Deep Dive Workshop by Todd Anglin: Part III Do you want to truly understand Silverlight? If so, do not miss this three-hour workshop that will cover everything from Silverlight basics to advanced topics like cross-site XHR. In the...

.NET Gotchas Workshop: Part II There are several things that one should pay attention to while programming on .NET, says Dr. Venkat Submramaniam. Are there things in .NET that, if we do not pay attention to, may result...