Best SCM Best Practices Article

The November 2007 issue of the CM Journal was devoted to the theme of "What Best Practice is Best?" Joe Farah's article on The Top 10 SCM Best Practices was quite possibly the best article on SCM best practices that I've come across to date!

Joe actually first lists his top ten "runners up" followed by his top ten. They are as follows (read the article if you see any terms that are unfamiliar to you):

1. Use of Change Packages
2. Stream-based Branching Strategy - do not overload branching
3. Status flow for all records with Clear In Box Assignments
4. Data record Owner and Assignee
5. Continuous integration with automated nightly builds from the CM repository
6. Dumb numbering
7. Main branch per release vs Main Trunk
8. Enforce change traceability to Features/Problem Reports
9. Automate administration to remove human error
10. Tailor your user interface closely to your process
11. Org chart integrated with CM tool
12. Change control of requirements
13. Continuous Automation
14. Warm-standby disaster recovery
15. Use Live data CRB/CIB meetings
16. A Problem is not a problem until it's in the CM repository
17. Use tags and separate variant code into separate files
18a. Separate Problems/Issues/Defects from Activities/Features/Tasks
18b. Separate customer requests from Engineering problems/features
19. Change promotion vs Promotion Branches
20. Separate products for shared code

Granted, some of these may not be particularly Agile (nor were they meant to be specific to Agile development or Agile CM) but it's still a pretty darn good list in my opinion!