The Ins and Outs of SCM
By Alice LaPlante
Advocates of software configuration management tools and techniques tend to resort to metaphor when describing why, once adopted, IT organizations can't live without them.
By far the most frequent comparison is to the assembly line popularized by Henry Ford (but not invented by him, as it is widely believed). Before that, workers built complex physical products one at a time: A single person -- or team -- created each part of a product individually and put them together, making customized changes to individual parts so that they would fit together correctly.
Traditional software development followed this same process. And it was inefficient and prone to delays and cost overruns. Using automated SCM development tools, on the other hand, means your development process is infinitely more predictable and reliable. Costs go down. Errors are dramatically reduced. Indeed, SCM -- like the industrial assembly line -- is transforming the way an entire industry works.
Fran Schmidt will attest to that. She was hired by Source Medical Inc. in Birmingham, Ala. three years ago, to be its manager of configuration management systems. Fran walked into a situation where the previous software development lifecycle (SDLC) regime had been broken for more than two years.
"It was horrible," she recalls. "They had onsite development, remote development, were operating on a twenty four-by-six schedule, and none of it was in sync. Not to mention that we had extremely tight budgetary and time constraints."
Schmidt had been watching a small company called AccuRev, based in Lexington, Mass., for several years, and decided to try its SCM product. "We were able to almost immediately achieve low maintenance and lost cost in our very distributed development environment," she says.
What to Look For
Over the last few years, dozens of SCM tools have been released into the market to provide options for IT development professionals who need help managing this complex process. These products support a broad range of diverse functionality. (article continues)
Next Page >>
