sneSCM

Scandinavian Network of Excellence
in
Software Configuration Management

Presentation abstracts:

Keynote: Driving Higher Quality with DevOps Initiatives (Sigurdur Birgisson):
Plenty of things have been written about the roles of testers/QA and SCMs in the ever-changing world of developers, DevOps, SRE et al. It is a fact that DevOps practices are here to stay, and the demands for time to market is getting ever so small. Still, high quality is what will keep your product relevant and customers happy.
Sigge will describe how DevOps initiatives can affect the culture of quality among development teams, driving high quality software delivery. Examples will include automation, monitoring and infrastructure as code.

SCM and DevOps (Christian Pendleton, Lars Bendix):
Unfortunately DevOps and traditional software configuration management (SCM) often seems to be a mismatch. Like children and parents apparently they don't understand each other. As "die-hard" SCM people we know that all types of projects need configuration management. So how can we make SCM and DevOps fall in love?
Projects are not alike and there is no "one size fits all" SCM that will work in all contexts and for all development methods. DevOps projects probably need SCM done in a different way and operationally by different (non-SCM) people – but how? We analysed the practices, activities, and goals of DevOps - and identified areas of DevOps where SCM can be helpful and supportive. We also analysed "the empire of SCM" and found SCM activities that should probably be carried out also in a DevOps context in order to make things work better and more smoothly.
After this presentation you will:

• implicitly know what has become old and outdated from your SCM toolbox
• explicitly know what new things you should add to your SCM toolbox
• have an idea of how you should cast "old principles" in a DevOps context
• know how to sell SCM to DevOps (if your are an SCM)
• know why you should buy SCM (if you are a DevOps)

Continuous Delivery as a Self-Service (Seif Al-Shakargi):
Continuous Delivery has today become an essential part of software development for a reliable and automated quality assurance process. However, the challenge of introducing CD starts with setting up a CD pipeline and providing the necessary infrastructure for it, which may take a considerable amount of time and require expertise knowledge. This complex and costly implementation will also require maintenance once in use.
The expertise required for CD is not always available in smaller teams making the QA process suffer. That is why this master thesis has researched how software development teams can setup and maintain CD without needing expertise with a Self-Service. By look into usability, maintainability and cost aspect, a requirement specification for a Minimum Viable Product was set by taking these aspects into account. A proof-of-concept sketch of a service was drawn up and validated with a small team by testing Software as a Service tools.

Open Space - Mining Software Repositories (Rasmus Hallevåg, Jesper Olsson):
Software repositories have become the standard practice in software development. Standard versioning tools collect large amounts of data regarding the change of files. Mining Software Repositories aims to navigate this large dataset to provide valuable information that could help decision making, but to what extent can meaningful data be obtained through datamining?
Some preliminary points of dicussion are:

• Which datamined metrics can be used to drive positive change?
• How should these these metrics be used in a way to avoid common pitfalls like antipatterns?
• How do we find the whys between all the whats, i.e. how could meaningful observation be made from the datamined metrics?.

Open Space - What role will a SCM professional play in a modern Agile or DevOps organization? (Otte Vinter):
Where do you see yourself and your role as a SCM specialist in the modern world of agility and elimination of handovers, where generalist rather than specialist competences are sought for?
Picture this scenario: I am a Programme/Project manager who wants to transform my organization to an agile one applying one of the prominent agile frameworks. Why should I hire you as a SCM specialist, what work should you do, and where should I place you in my new organization?
And the same question in case I want my organization to be DevOps based?

Repository sizing (Johan Abildskov):
Perhaps even more controversial than rebase vs. merge is Mono vs Many-repos. During my consultancy career I've helped companies go in either directions, with good reasons for both transitions. This talk will remove the gut-feeling part of deciding your repository structure, and instead dive into the available tools and considerations for deciding what is the right repository structure for your organisation based on science and technology.

Metrics, Measurements - and SCM (Lars Bendix):
The activity of Configuration Status Accounting (CSA) is where configuration managers record data and report information to the projects manager (PM) in a (bi-)weekly report. At least that is how the story is according to the standards.
However, a more modern interpretation of CSA is that since SCM is responsible for all the Configuration Items (CI), we also have direct access to all the data for these CIs. We can collect this data and turn it into information for anyone interested - not just the PM - and we can publish it continuously from live data. In a DevOps context the M in CAMS stands for Measurement in a more broad and general sense. How much of that that SCM should be involved in is an interesting question.
In this presentation I will touch on the following kinds of metrics:

• those related to a software development project
• those related to the business (and production)
• those focused on the SCM processes