Kandt's SCM Best-Practices: Protection 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 Protection Best-Practices for SCM (in priority order, with the most important ones listed first):

Practice 15:

Use a software system to perform configuration management functions

Also known as: "Use an SCM tool!"

Practice 16:

Repositories should exist on reliable physical storage elements

Practice 17:

Configuration management repositories should be periodically backed-up to non-volatile storage and purged of redundant or useless information

Practice 18:

Test and confirm the backup process

Is there really anything here to argue with? (I didn't think so :-)

Oh, and that #18 is one that is often overlooked. I can't tell you the number of times I've come across folks that think there stuff is safe "cuz it's backed-up," but their backup process didn't confirm that they were able to successfully read/extract the data that was archived.

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