sneSCM

Scandinavian Network of Excellence
in
Software Configuration Management

Session abstracts:

Branching considered harmful (Lars Bendix):
In March 1968 Edsger Dijkstra published his famous letter "Go To Statement Considered Harmful". When I read it at university, I thought that it would be impossible to program without go to statements, but since I left behind me assembly programming I have never used a go to statement.
In this Open Space, I will claim - and try to argue - that branching should also be considered harmful. That it brings more problems than advantages. I hope that the participants will bring their branching cases - and try to convince me that they make sense and try to prove me wrong.
After the discussions everyone will hopefully be more knowledgable and wise about why most branching really does not make sense - and in which cases it is really worth paying the price of branching.

Branching in the large (Andreas Göransson):
There exist quite a few different branching methods, but it seems that they all focus on smaller groups/projects. Once the project grows to hundreds of developers working with different parts of a software system the branching methods need to scale up as well.
In this interactive presentation, a real life use case will be presented and during the session different aspects och "branching in the large" will be discussed.

Docker and K8S – What’s in it for a CM geek (like me)? (Christian Pendleton):
I will talk about how Docker and Kubernetes changes the life for us CM experts. We will discuss what CM-related problems can they solve and what new problems they bring to the party.

Introducing SCM to a young agile start-up (Lars Bendix):
One of the projects that the students can chose on my configuration management course is titled "How, what and when to introduce SCM in a small start-up". My students always get the when and sometimes/often also the how completely wrong. We discuss it at the oral exam and usually we end up agreeing on the when and how for the whats.
In this Open Space, I would like to put my opinions to the test. To see to what degree my ideas align with those of real-life practitioners of SCM.
Even if your company is not a new start-up maybe your needs (the what) and your priorities (the when) could/should be the same, though the implementation (the how) will probably differ.

Generative AI and Software Configuration Management + What developers must know about version control (and collaboration) tools (Workshop):
For the time being the two potential topics to dig deeper into in this workshop are Generative AI and Version control (and collaboration) tools. However, the precise contents of the workshop will be heavily influenced by the participants' interests.

Generative AI and SCM: The use of Generative AI in software development is a fact of life. How does that influence the work of the configuration manager? Will we get new or changed tasks because the rest or the organization has started using GAI? Will we be able to use GAI for solving better/easier some of the SCM tasks that we are currently taking care of?

What everyone must know about version control (and collaboration) tools: Version control tools (like git) are used by everyone in an organization. Mostly they are used as collaboration tools, but for some aspects also for version control. What is it that these people need to know about version control and collaboration to be able to use these tools? And that you wil probably have to teach them if they haven't learned it elsewhere.