SNESCM

Scandinavian Network of Excellence
in
Software Configuration Management

Presentation abstracts:

SCM as the center of Project Management (Ola Eklundh):
The aim of the presentation is to show how Software Configuration Management and Change Management tools can be a Project Managers best friend, by showing how we use tools for giving all stakeholders of the project good insight in the project status.
You will follow a walkthrough of how a Telelogic development lab is using integrated tools, with the SCM system as the backbone, closely together to help the Project Manager keep track of progress. A set of requirements that we consider important on a good SCM/CM solution will be presented.

Mining Software Repositories (Lars Bendix):
For many years I have claimed that we as SCM people are in a very central - and powerful - position because we have the company's crown jewels in our hands. Our software repositories are - or should be - literal gold mines just waiting to be exploited and put at the service of the rest of the company.
I am not alone with that view. The past four years there has been a workshop dedicated to the Mining Software Repositories and they continue this year with a two-day working conference just two weeks before our SCM day.
In my presentation, I will report interesting results from previous workshops as well as bring fresh results and trends from this year's working conference.

How SCRUM upset my life; an interview with a disgruntled CM (Peter Walls):
This presentation describes a project that decides to adopt the SCRUM methodology. New ways of working come in conflict with the old CM process and a lot of problems arise. The underlying reasons for the problems and how they could have been avoided are presented.

SCM in Scrum projects (Andreas Bergström):
Scrum is becoming a popular project management method for agile software development. A few of its fundamental principles are self-organizing teams, no distinct roles within the team and no leader. Scrum does not define any software development techniques or methods for the implementation phase - that is up to the teams to decide.
So how much effort is - or should be - spent on Software Configuration Management? Which constraints should be considered for the development teams? And how can SCM be tailored to work well together with the principles of Scrum?
During my master's thesis at Lund Institute of Technology, I have been trying to answer these questions and in this presentation, I will talk about my results.

Introducing a Continuous Integration Framework in a Large Organization (Tero Kojo):
Continuous integration (CI) is the current hot topic in the software industry. In itself CI does not present anything new, it just means that you build and test your changes as early and as fast as possible. In the case that I am presenting, the challenge of introducing a new tool and framework to a large organisation is both technical and social. The technical aspects relate to the complexity of the build environment. And the social aspects to change resistance present in a large organisation.
The organisation is spread out geographically and culturally, creating an additional aspect of complexity to the introduction. The CI system in this case is built around open source components with the necessary parts being developed in house. This development is also spread out globally.
This presentation sketches out how the introduction was conducted, how it went and what the lessons from the introduction were.

Practical Continuous Integration (Jonas Blunck):
Continuous Integration is ultimately a practice to help a team reduce project risk and feel safe about the state of their code base. In recent years, a number of products have turned up for automating the practice. One of those is CruiseControl.NET, for the .NET platform, which is free, open-source and relatively easy to get running. We have been using CruiseControl.NET for a couple of years, and have found a number of ways of extending it and improving on the experience. In this session, we thought we'd share some of our experiences and ideas for how to make CruiseControl.NET work with custom build tools, unit testing, custom reporting mechanisms, source control systems and on non-Windows platforms.

SCM and out-sourcing (Christian Pendleton):
Outsourcing is a growing business in the world of software development. Are there any special requirements on the CM discipline when a company chooses to outsource all, or parts, of its development work? And the other way around, are there any requirements on the routines for outsourcing that origins from the CM area?
I will present a couple of common ways of handling a situation where development work is outsourced, some real life examples of these ways of working and how these situations affects the CM work. I will also discuss how different development models, such as the newer agile and lean models, affects the CM-work in an outsourcing situation.

Document management with the SCM approach (Michael Redlich Lindahl):
Moving the company through version management to configuration management into the branching concept way of thinking. We have many different types of users to manage, from the end users, vendors and the whole IT organization.
The concept should be simple so all the users could accept it as their daily work tool and yet we should have the flexibility to manage all of these documents (around 16.000 files and 36 applications) for each solution.
The simple solution was to introduce the "Work" and "Public" principle together with version and configuration management (including a naming standard). Basically the users keep all of their work documents in the "Work" branch. When the document is ready to be released (approved) it is moved to the "Public" branch and can then be viewed by users belonging to other domains.
We will walk you through the process we have been through the last 8 months to get this concept to be reality for 300 users in ATP.