President and CEO of Neuma Technology, Joe Farah is a regular contributor to the CM Journal. Prior to cofounding Neuma in 1990, he was a director of software at Mitel. In the 1970s, Joe developed the Program Library System (PLS), still heavily used by Nortel (Bell-Northern Research), where he worked at the time. He's been a software developer since the late 1960s.
A recently resurrected LinkedIn discussion on migrating from ClearCase to an open source tool got some CM professionals to agree about the tool selection process. Joe Farah explains some tips to help you choose the right tool.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” goes the saying. But when it comes to CM, it seems that even if it is “broke,” nobody wants it fixed—except of course, the CM manager. Joe Farah explains why this "resistance to change" is a big roadblock to CM professionals and how to fight it.
By now, most of us are familiar with the agile software development methodology. Typically this methodology uses Scrum, Kanban, or some other discipline to help teams move rapidly and iteratively toward the completion of a software product. But what about agile software configuration management?
Joe Farah describes how to not overload your branching with variants so as to permit your customers to dynamically modify the behavior of a software product. Variant management is a CM issue, but it has to be dealt with in the product design first.
A change package in software configuration management goes by many names. The CM industry realizes that the change package concept is fundamental to software CM and that life without updates can be complex.
Traceability provides the means to ensure that a product is correctly packaged and deployed. Joe Farah shares some tips that will help your team recognize proper traceability in order to keep track of and use data more efficiently when building a software product.
A recent thread on LinkedIn asks "Which is better: single checkouts or multiple checkouts?" On projects, both large and small, using exclusive checkouts is actually preferred.
