Kandt's SCM Best-Practices: Management Practices

More from the paper Software Configuration Management Principles and Best Practices, by Ronald Kirk Kandt, appearing in the Proceedings of PROFES2002, the 4th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement, Rovanieme Finland, December 2002.

In this article, Ronald Kandt describes ten basic principles that support configuration management activities, and then goes on to describe twenty three "fundamental" practices, which are split across the categories of: Management Practices, Quality Practices, Protection Practices, and Tool Practices.


In this entry, I'll enumerate Kandt's Management Best-Practices for SCM (in priority order, with the most important ones listed first):

Practice 1:

Maintain a unique, read-only copy of each release

Also known as: create an immutable release label

Practice 2:

Control the creation, modification, and deletion of software artifacts following a defined procedure

Also known as: use version control, and agree on how you'l be doing it -- for example by identifying which SCM patterns you'll be using and their specific implementation in your project's context

Practice 3:

Create a formal approval process for requesting and approving changes

Also known as: manage change/scope, preferably by managing expectations rather than by trying to prevent change

Practice 4:

Use Change Packages

This one is more than just task-level commit, it builds on task-level-commit to provide task-based-development

Practice 5:

Use shared build processes and tools

We wrote about this in our October 2003 CM Journal article on Agile Build Management and it's March 2004 successor article on Continuous Staging

Practice 6:

A version manifest should describe each software release

This is more than just a self-identifying configuration listing of files and versions. Kandt also intends it to mean identifying the set of features, fixes, and enhancements too, as well as all open problems and issues. This is often included in the release notes for a new release. It also relates to the information necessary to satisfy a configuration audit.

Practice 7:

Segregate derived artifacts from source artifacts

Also known as: know your sources from your targets! Often times, the versioning/storage strategies used for the two may differ. (Of course, that's not the only reason to segregate them.)

Next up, we'll look at what Kandt identifies as Quality practices in his list of 23 SCM best-practices.