Adapting Configuration Management for Agile Teams

Effective Agile allows your team to move quickly and with confidence to evolve your business needs in short iterations. Configuration Management (CM) provides the smooth road and controls needed to maintain such a fast pace. The key is finding the right balance between Agile and CM, allowing you to stay on track whilst maintaining high velocity.

Many professionals find the alignment of CM and Agile a challenge. However, adaptive CM for Agile should not mean discarding the CM principles of identification, control, audit, and report, nor does it mean ignoring Agile values. Instead, it involves providing the best integration through rigorous yet lean CM practices that give Agile projects the necessary traction to stay on course and maintain the integrity the customer expects.

The question is, how do we achieve this?

Adapting Configuration Management for Agile Teams offers tangible approaches on how Configuration Management, with its practices and infrastructure, can be adapted and managed to directly benefit Agile teams. Written by Mario E. Moreira, author of Software Configuration Management Implementation Roadmap, columnist for CM Crossroads online community, and writer for the Agile Journal, this unique book provides concrete guidance on tailoring CM for Agile projects without sacrificing the principles of Configuration Management.

When done properly, CM provides the lean and evolving structure needed for Agile projects to continue running swiftly. CM for Agile can be a very powerful combination when executed effectively. Inside, learn how to:

• Adapt to Continuous Integration and Build by introducing notions of bite-sized tasks, right-sizing branches, minimizing merging, emphasizing continuous build, and testing with teeth.
• Adapt CM Planning, shifting from big-effort-up-front (BEUF) to a more evolutionary approach, applying an iteration 0 to get started, adapting CM roles and responsibilities, and considering wikis and other CM formats.
• Adapt CM to better support more effective Refactoring, Pair Programming, and Test Driven Development (TDD).
• Adapt CM to support Distributed Development for Agile teams when co-location is not an option by performing a distributed analysis and considering the best code access solution.
• Adapt CM to support Traceability, Baselines, Problem Management, CM Audit, and CM Reporting with lean metrics in an Agile context.
• Merge the mindsets of CM and Agile to form a powerful partnership.
• Approach technical infrastructure for Agile through Infrastructure Envisioning for brand new product lines or Infrastructure Refactoring for modifying existing infrastructure, focused on minimizing infrastructure debt while considering on-premises infrastructure or in-the-cloud solutions.
• Approach CM infrastructure for Agile through implementing CM Envisioning for a brand new product line following Agile methods or through CM Refactoring when adapting CM for an existing product line transitioning to Agile methods.
• Recognise those CM tools that can be strategic Agile partners and understand how modern CM features aid in implementing Agile effectively.
• Effectively evaluate CM and Agile tools to ensure selection of those tools best suited for and aligned with your Agile needs.
• Support your Agile needs effectively when your organisation, product team, or project must align with CM standards and frameworks.

Sprinkled throughout the book are "Pit Stops," providing insightful CM and Agile information in bite-sized chunks as takeaways for the reader and to encourage further reading.