Free Webinar: Emerging SCM Best Practices for Agile Development

More Agile resources

AccuRev is hosting a free Webinar on “Emerging SCM Best Practices for Agile Development” on Thursday, February 5 from 1:00 – 2:00 PM EST. The webinar will introduce the unique demands that agile processes place on legacy SCM tools and ways to build and automate an efficient Agile development process. Damon Poole, AccuRev CTO, and Uttam Narsu will be presenting.

Mr. Narsu, an industry expert on software configuration management (SCM) best practices and former Forrester/Giga analyst, will discuss the most important aspects to consider when applying SCM best practices to an agile world.  Mr. Poole will discuss how Multi-stage Continuous Integration can solve some of the underlying impediments to a successful Agile development environment.

“SCM is critical to Agile success. If your SCM tools don’t provide integrated and seamless support for Agile, you won’t get widespread adoption of Agile development,” said Narsu. “Development teams require brutally efficient SCM tools, but the tools must still be issue-based, must have support for flexible process models, and enable efficient branching, merging, and refactoring. The SCM tool should also provide private workspaces and assist continuous integration.”

Mr. Narsu has worked with hundreds of clients using wildly differing software development environments. While clients who succeed with agile development have strong SCM practices, the best practiced agile SCM: transparently integrated, flexible, and collaborative.

Specific topics discussed will include:

• Typical SCM obstacles to Agile success and how to avoid them;
• Key Agile Process requirements for SCM products and specific use case scenarios;
• Challenges with continuous integration, and how Multi-stage Continuous Integration delivers value and how to adopt it today; and
• Key SCM metrics for delivering on Agile development goals.

Register here for this free webinar taking place on Thursday, February 5th from 1:00-2:00 EST: Emerging SCM Best Practices for Agile Development.

Continuous Integration: The temptation of the Antipattern

You’ve started using Continuous Integration (CI), but it’s not quite meeting your needs. You’ve started out simply enough, getting a build to happen on Linux or some other common environment. You’ve gotten comfortable enough to start using it in more and more places.

You hear the whispers of potential. Maybe they come from coworkers, maybe you hear them in your head, maybe you’re hearing the antipattern. Yeah he’s talking to you, and he’s very tempting. Go ahead, add more tests, he says. Automated documentation, yeah that will work. Run some performance and benchmarking. Run some reports it can take it he says. Worse yet, the antipattern is sitting in the cube next to you. The antipattern doesn’t like to check in his code until it is ‘just right’, and then it is a big chunk of messy merged globby spaghetti code I wouldn’t eat and your product shouldn’t either.

The antipattern is tempting. Even the “good book” of CI talks about being careful of the antipattern, and then goes on to say go ahead and add more to your CI process. Very very tempting.

Beware of the temptation! Don’t fall into the hands of the antipattern. It only results in disappointment. There are people out there just waiting to show that CI isn’t successful. They are waiting for the first real failed build, delayed delivery, or time spent working on a tool instead of the product to kill the usefulness.

I should know, because I’ve given into temptation. We had a good CI setup going, our build processes were running smoother, broken builds were being caught before they became critical. And then I added benchmarking. Worked great. We were getting additional reports on leaks and bottlenecks. And we had time to attack them and slowly make them less and less of a problem. We were being lean. But then I heard the whisper. Run reports it said. Build some doc it said. So I tried. I wanted automated reports, one less thing to do manually right? But I wanted them with every CI build. Now the builds were taking 1/2 hour to an hour. Not so bad. Until code started breaking. You see, at the same time that I was tempted so were others. And it was easy. Large chunks of code were being added, destabilizing builds. Tests were failing over and over until people stopped listening to them. There was no buffer between changes and the rest of the developers. Yeah, we were able to clean up the mess using AccuRev, but the CI damage had been done. Benchmarking fell by the wayside while I tried to get reporting done. And the build took days to stabilize even while we scraped the code clean of the problem areas. And this was when the antipattern was able to leverage our misstep. Leaks got into the code. Not enough to destabilze, but enough that product performance could suffer. Instead of catching it early we caught it late, and the cost was that much higher when we fixed the problems.

That was over 2 years ago, but I’m here to repent. I had forsaken the usefulness and message of CI. The temptation was to strong for me then, but I and our product have recovered. Non-critical automation is no longer a dream to be shared with CI, but as a post operation run more infrequently. Stability and Performance of our product our paramount and CI is helping us keep them in line. I have exorcised the antipattern and remain vigilant.

Is Defect Tracking Dead in an Agile World?

by Damon Poole

There are some who recommend against using a defect tracking system. Instead, it is recommended that when a bug is found, it is fixed immediately. While that is certainly one way of preventing an ever growing inventory of defects, the tracking of an inventory of defects is one of the smallest benefits of a defect tracking system. Overall, a defect tracking system serves as a facilitator. It simplifies the collection of defect reports from all sources. It isn’t just the developers responsible for fixing the defects that find problems. Customers, developers working on dependent systems, and testers also find defects. Even if you have a policy of fixing defects as soon as they are found, it isn’t always logistically possible to do so. For instance, if you are currently working on fixing a defect and in the process of doing so you find another one, you don’t want to lose track of it. Thus, a defect tracking system coordinates the collection of defect reports in a standard way and collects them in a well known location, insuring that important information about the functioning of your system is not lost. The problem of creating a defect inventory is completely orthogonal to the user of a defect tracking system.

A defect tracking system also manages the progress of work through the development life cycle from reporting, to triaging, to assignment, to test development, to completion, to test, to integration, to delivery. It simplifies the answering of customer questions such as “what is fixed in this release” and “what release will the fix appear in.” A defect tracking system also allows for the collection of metrics which aids in the spotting of trends. I have heard from multiple sources that metrics collected from an issue tracking system are worthless because developers will just game the system. That may be true in an unhealthy environment. However, in an environment where developers are actively participating in the improvement of the process, they will want this information in order to help to find and fix problems, including the root cause of individual problems.

AccuRev is a Jolt Award 2008 Finalist

AccuRev 4.6 for ClearCase, which includes our new ClearCase Coexistence Adapter, has been selected as a Finalist in the 2008 Jolt Product Excellence Awards! James has been sharing with you some of the core new features in AccuRev 4.6 in his previous posts, such as the VersionSlider and viewing work-in-progress at the Issue level, but for a more detailed look, check out the What’s New in 4.6 Web page.

2007 was truly the year of both SCCM conversion, and co-existence (a relatively new concept). While AccuRev added significant new features to its core offering this year, enabling co-existence with leading SCCM solutions is jolting in a number of significant ways.

AccuRev is the glue that allows teams to continue using their existing SCCM infrastructure, while integrating AccuRev into new or existing projects.  This eliminates risk and potential disruption associated with a comprehensive one-time conversion, and provides freedom of choice.

AccuRev 4.6 for ClearCase enables adoption of AccuRev in previously homogenous ClearCase environments, through real-time bi-directional synchronization without rework or porting. Ultimately, these organizations will save time, money, and deliver higher quality software.

Jolt Product Excellence Winners for 2008 will be announced at the SD West conference in March.

Happy Holidays!

Agile Programmable Completion – AccuRev + GNU Bash

When at the command line (CLI), productivity means keeping your hands on the keyboard. But once your fingers have memorized all the commands, flags, static arguments, and common usage patterns — can you still get faster?

Yes.

Programmable completion is a shell facility that allows for customizing the command line in real-time as it is typed. Also referred to as “TAB Completion”, many shells in both Linux and Windows have a default implementation that support completion on filenames and directories. If you’re lucky, you’ll even get environment variables and functions.

Let’s move to software configuration management (SCM). Various branch and label-based SCM systems like CVS have basic tab completion for commands and flags. Thats a good start. But an agile user needs a context-sensitive, custom-data completion facility. What you ~really~ want is completion on your own data — branch names, labels, usernames, etc.

Users of stream-based AccuRev are in luck.

Do you use AccuRev on Linux? If so, download the latest GNU Bash (2.05+) completion for AccuRev 4.5.x. Here is the README. You’ll never have to memorize flags or type stream names again.

Coming in Part 2 — Support for Windows users.

/happy tabbing/ – dave