SNESCM

Scandinavian Network of Excellence
in
Software Configuration Management

Presentation abstracts:

A Life in CM (Peter Jensen):

1. Personal background
2. Career
3. Lessons learned
4. Recommendations
5. New challenges

Problems with multiple repositories for large software eco-systems (Christian Pendleton, Jan Magnusson):
When scaling up to large eco-systems for software development, you will have to split the software into multiple repositories.
We will talk about problems we have observed in an organization, handling modularized systems that span over several repositories.

Big scale test and build automation and SCM at SunGard Capital Markets Trading (Per Brandt, Sten Rosendahl):
SunGard Capital Markets Trading builds software for banks and financial institutions. This is mission critical software for the customers, where they use it to trade over phone, or electronically on exchanges and different networks. This trading is both manual and automatic using algorithms and high frequency trading. All this trading activity is captured in real time and the risk and profit loss is calculated giving a continuous control of the situation. The software needs to be high performance, always correct and compliant, and when the market conditions go crazy it must be 100% dependable.
To be able to create this software early often and responsively in an agile manner - with discipline, quality and accuracy, we depend on a big scale test and build automation system supported by a SCM.
We have created a 600 virtual machines monster to handle this, where every check-in to main or production fix branches result in 4000 CPU hours of tests are run, and the results stored in a test result database.
What we look for in an SCM system:

• Tight integration with IDEs used like Visual Studio
• Transparent use from remote locations, performance and functionality.
• User-level GUI support for easy branching and merging/shelving with work item tracking
• Possible to create a tight and custom integration with Remedy ARS (problem tracking) and Quickbuild (continuous integration)
• Support for coexistance with/migration from ClearCase
• Atomic check-ins to enable clear commit blame algorithms for failing tests
• Team collaboration possibilities; team branches, peer-to-peer sharing, streams, automation of promotes etc.

Build systems from a SCM perspective (Joachim Nilsson, Ola Eklundh):
This presentation will start with a feature comparison of modern versus older build systems. In this we will see how build systems have evolved to support more specialized tasks. The modern build system feature list will be discussed with references to existing build systems. We will also discuss how integrated VCS and build systems have become and what benefits build systems have to the SCM role. The topic will be finalized with a discussion of future trends in build systems.

Application Lifecycle Management or The Empire of Software Configuration Management (Lars Bendix):
To Linus Torvalds SCM is Source Code Management, which just goes to show that no-one is perfect ;-)
There is a core of things that are common (and identical) to Configuration Management no matter whether you produce roller skates, mobile phones or (pure) software. However, when you move from the world of "hardware" (which was the domain of the inventor of CM) to software there are a number of new things we as SCM can and should take under our wings.
The software world brings new challenges, but also possibilities to expand the SCM empire. Wayne Babich showed already many years ago how SCM can be used to co-ordinate a team of people by proper use of a version control tool. Build Management has been a must for some companies for years and has in recent years been extended into Continuous Deployment.
This presentation will be a panorama over what things could possibly be included under the SCM umbrella. Hopefully you will go home with an idea or two for how you could expand the service you currently offer to your own organisation.

Variant handling for mobile web applications (Henrik Gyllensvärd, Niklas Welander):
Native web applications are on the rise along with new mobile platforms like Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch and Tizen. The applications are based on the HTML5 standard and thus the code base should be very similar between the platforms. We are investigating the possibility of making the development easier; by combining this to one code base with small deviations for each platform, instead of having one separate code base per platform.

Challenges for SCM in a Continuous Delivery world (Mark Warren, Perforce):
Many organizations, not just SaaS are adopting Continuous Delivery approaches so new releases are happening by the week, day, hour, minute and second. What pressures does this put on SCM? What are best practices? The group will discuss these issues and more with a view to sharing lessons learned and create best practice recommendations.

Ten Years After: SCM Patterns Revisited (Tomas Lundström, AccuRev):
It is now ten years since the influential book Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration by Steve Berczuk with Brad Appleton (http://www.scmpatterns.com/book/) was published. In this session, we will discuss if/how the last ten years of evolution in software development have affected the conclusions of the book. What are the timeless truths? What needs adjustments?