Joe Townsend

There are many reasons for getting a certification, including professional advancement and promotion, pay raises, and recognition that you are at a certain level in your career, but there are still some factors you need to to consider before you take the plunge.

Because configuration management professionals are not united and are often unable to agree on basic concepts, it's important to work together to find a middle ground—especially when coming up with mutually agreed upon definitions.

Implementing configuration management in small teams presents a distinct set of challenges. Your ability to “right size” the effort will go a long way in how successful you are. Find out what questions to ask before you get started.

In theory, build management is simple. But like many aspects of IT, in reality, it's quite complex. This article introduces the basics of build management and provides a foundation on which to build further study.

We in the CM/ALM community rely on tools, but how do we pick the best tools for the job? These six requirements outline what we look for in our ALM tools and what we don't want to see. Vendors, take heed!

DevOps is a movement that is underway or at least in the very early stages of infancy as a way to rid the IT world of some if not most of its silo’s.  Silos have existed in Information Technology (IT) from the beginning for two reasons, the complex nature of early IT systems and because that’s the way businesses are run, for the most part.  Silo’s are an easy way for Accounting to make sense of business operations, for example, marketing only does marketing activities, sales does sales, distribution does distribution, etc.  So fast forward to today’s IT environment where Agile is taking hold and become more prevalent, where IT systems are becoming more complex, where news reaches the rest of the worlds in seconds not days or weeks.  Large scale failures and inefficiency is becoming not only way of life, in some people’s eyes it’s the norm in IT.  DevOps is an attempt to correct this: Will it succeed?  Time will tell.

I would like to say I could predict what was going to happen without fail and without a shred of doubt in 2011, but the only thing I can predict is that I will get it wrong.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to look ahead, we should just do so without expecting much of it to come true.  So what we end up with is simply guesses and a laundry list of things we would like to see happen.  Another way to predict is to paint with broad strokes that no matter what happens we look like we are soothsayers.  Well here are my guesses and wish list for 2011, enjoy.

There are several questions you have to ask and answer when implementing software configuration management (SCM) for small teams: Is the minimalist approach of SCM congruent with my duties to implement sound SCM? Is there a difference between implementing SCM on small versus large teams? Can I pick and choose the concepts of SCM to implement?