I have been working as a software consultant for more than 11 years. Because of that I am an eager supporter of lean principles and agile methods.
-Evolving the CM Discipline Through the Agile Paradigm Shift-
My article have just been published in the fall issue of Methods & Tools. The abstract:
Configuration management, as a discipline for supporting software development, has been around for half a century and has evolved into standard practice within traditional software development processes. One of the key purposes of configuration management is to control changes made to the software product.
Lean software principles focus on delivering customer value in a steady flow and eliminating unnecessary process waste. One way to implement lean is to introduce agile software development methods, such as Scrum or XP. Agile values also have a lot of focus on how to handle changes, but unlike traditional CM, agile methods are being more adaptive to changes.
The increasing popularity of agile development methods is putting new demands on the traditional CM discipline. A working CM environment is essential for the rapid nature of agile development methods, but the CM process and the CM role has to be adapted to the present evolution of software development methods as well as automated tools.
This article discusses lean principles and agile values within a CM scope and also introduces a method to classify the CM discipline in relation to development method and level of tool automation, and finally shares some of the experiences of the author.