Configuration Management & ALM

Configuration Management & ALM

Configuration Management and ALM Stories
The Financial System and Biological Suicide

The US financial system has been severally impacted by many outages in recent months. These banking technology glitches have been described as a form of "biological suicide," which highlights the dangers of banks continuing to rely on outdated legacy systems.

The 2012 State of Configuration Management AddressJust as the president of the United States gives a State of the Union address, Joe Townsend has crafted his own state of the union address geared toward CM professionals. To all of you configuration managers, developers, testers, and information technology workers, the state of CM is not good.
Configuration Managers: Fighting the Resistance to Change“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.
Cyber Attacks: The Effect on CM and QAThis month US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta issued a call to arms over the growing cyber attacks on American banks. Joe Townsend explores how these attacks will affect configuration management professionals and quality assurance dilemmas.
The Risks of Implementing BYODCIOs and IT directors need to know if they are putting themselves at risk when they implement "bring your own device," or BYOD. Joe Townsend considers whether or not the benefits of this business policy outweigh the risks to a company's security.
It's Time to Be Clear about Agile SCMBy 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?
VMware Updates vCloud Suite While Cisco Eyes a Potential RivalVirtualization software giant VMware, Inc. made news this week with an update to the company’s vCloud Suite 5.1 while two top executives at VMware and Cisco made public the companies’ tenuously friendly relationship.
Variant Management Starts with DesignJoe 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.