BRITISH COMPUTER SOCIETY CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT SPECIALIST GROUP

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Presentation Abstracts

There are links to those papers/slides online for each presentation below.

Richard Morreale (keynote) - "Hey, I’m Excited!"

The standards, processes and procedures relating to Change, Configuration and Release Management have been around for decades. We all know that when they are part of the controls on a project that the project has a much better chance of success. We all know that if they are implemented properly they work! We’re sold on it. In fact, we can show examples, however limited, of how and when they were instrumental in helping deliver successful projects. So, let me ask you this question. With all this on our side, why do we still have such a tough time selling Change, Configuration and Release Management? Why, when we do implement these controls on projects we have such a tough time getting people to follow the standards, processes and procedures. Richard presents, in this keynote address, what he believes is the answer. And it might not be what you think.

Callum Kidd (keynote) - "Developing Enquiring Minds – Professional Development and Managing Configurations"

An aerial view of configuration management across a range of industries shows two distinct typologies: the Roundhead and the Cavalier. For Roundheads CM is defined and driven by standards. There is little room for innovation, and indeed any thoughts of changing the process is discouraged, or at best made extremely difficult. The Roundhead type is the easiest CM process to study, since it is organizationally visible and has clear lines of communication, control and operation. It deals extremely well with routine tasks and procedures, but copes badly with unexpected occurrences.

The Cavalier on the other hand is highly innovative. At the highest levels, it shares a common view of CM with the Roundhead Type, but in terms of deployment, it is often invisible in the organization. Although there is a CM process, it is adaptable and fluid, designed to cope with rapid change and quick decision making. In many cases, the practice of CM is devolved away from a centralised function and made the responsibility of project teams or those involved in the design and support phases.

My current research is looking to develop practitioners who can work effectively in both environments, bringing innovation to the Roundhead Type and order to the Cavalier Type.

David Cuthbertson - "Selling The Value of CM"

Configuration management is often seen as a necessity after a major system outage, where coordination of change is seen as important as the application or service itself. Quantifying the value and benefits of CM helps to ensure a faster adoption of CM by the business and colleagues. In an informal and light-hearted session, we will cover tips and tricks to help communicate (“or sell”) CM in a tangible way to less enthusiastic colleagues.

Steve Elmes - "Configuration Management Challenges Of The UK's Largest Ever Ship Build & Integration Contract "

CVF (Future Aircraft Carrier) is the first MoD (Ministry of Defence) project to use a MoD/Industry Alliance Contract framework to expand the existing MoD SMART procurement methodology. Steve’s talk will range over many of the issues and aspects associated with undertaking such a large scale project as CVF.

John Parker - "The Secrets of Success on a Large Scale"

The success, and in some cases failure, of large software projects can be a lesson for everyone.

The challenges that face any organisation embarking on a large-scale software development project are common to those encountered in many other disciplines, including the aerospace and defence industries. This session will look at the challenges imposed by the nature of the projects, the typical geographies of such teams and self-imposed problems that can, and should, be avoided. We will show why Configuration Management should be the principal tool at the centre of such projects, the capabilities required and some of the key benefits, to defeat the problems and inspire you to achieve success.

Delivery of success depends on the correct application of appropriate experience and technology.

Ian Maskell - "Product Lifecycle Management role in Systems Integration"

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is the holistic view of the complete product lifecycle toolset, processes and methodology. Challenges along the PLM road are well known, but they still manage to hit some projects hard. This presentation introduces the basics that must be achieved in order to achieve the maximum benefit from a PLM strategy. Integration ‘IS’ the key.

Neil White - "Configuration Management and Large Scale Systems Integration Projects"

The fundamentals of Configuration Management are universally known but not necessarily fully comprehended. Configuration management, when considered holistically, helps provide the framework for ‘high integrity’ ‘low risk’ systems development. In his presentation Neil takes the opportunity to highlight how analogous the CM activities on Large Scale Integration projects are with CM activities across all industry sectors – irrespective of size.

Glenn Ellis - "Configuration Management and its Friends from Womb to Tomb"

The Lifecycle Phases of Configuration Management

The paper will describe how Configuration Management establishes relationships and supports the various phases of a products life cycle. Beginning at the “Request For Tender” and moving through typical project phases, it will identify the relationships and disciplines required to be established between the various players involved in major projects.

The paper will discuss the required contractor, customer, subcontractor and end user interfaces, it will also illustrate how effective Configuration Management can be a saviour of projects. The paper looks at methodologies and processes that support the release, production change control, verification/validation, delivery and customer acceptance.

It will cover "through life" support, identifying the significant part that Configuration Management plays in this ongoing and important project phase. It provides Configuration Management practitioners the opportunity to illustrate the worth of the quality records collected during the earlier project phases and clearly illustrates the value of “Configuration Management from “Womb to Tomb”.

Keith Allen - "Building an Enterprise CM solution"

This paper looks at the complex issues in building a common development life cycle strategy across a large financial organisation, where any and all applications independent of operating platform are and will be managed. The paper reviews the different ‘processors’ required at each development to live migrations, and associates the respective controls that must be implement. The paper relates to the ITIL best practice layer approach, and also introduces the ‘Business Management Process’ rules and controls.

René Schaap - "Control in the Project World - does Prince 2 Work?"

PRrojects IN Controlled Environments. Although the project management method PRINCE2 has been adopted by many organisations, it is used more often in an uncontrolled rather than the intended controlled environment. Many organisations are still struggling to get their environments under control; do we really need more methods?

Projects continue to run late and 20% are completed over budget. When deliverables are finally handed over to operations most of the information with which to efficiently and effectively adapt the product/service to future needs is untraceable. Why is this not surprising for those who spend a great deal of their working lives in the Configuration Management area? The answer is simple: because it’s the job of a configuration manager to keep objects under control - “one can’t control if one doesn’t know what to control”.

The drawback of many project management methods is that they briefly mention configuration management issues and often dedicating these tasks to administrative personnel. Add good CM practices and a project using project management methods like PRINCE2 and a competent management team (PM/QA/CM) have a far greater chance to succeed. The CM manager and his team will supply the prerequisite for success: the controlled environment.

Start a project with a skilled and competent configuration manager. The project manager is the heart of the project but the CM team are the lungs – they supply the oxygen to survive.

John Metcalfe - "Can we afford the luxury of a CC & RM Group?"

The Challenge of Informal CC & RM (Change Control & Release Management) in a Retail Banking Environment

The presentation will take listener from a situation of chaos in a complex system release process which resulted in many build errors through process evolution to a managed processes of configurations, changes control and releases management. This is being achieved, not through traditional consultative techniques, but through problem identification, and collaborative solution development. The arena is a retail banking environment with constant change, deadlines fixed by FSA regulations, a compartmentalised organisational structure and inappropriate IT development support environment. The presentation will identify the lessons learned including not only CC&RM issues but also organisational and communication issues.

James Buffenbarger - "A Large-Scale Fault-Tolerant Distributed Software-Build Process"

A large software system can be compiled and linked more quickly if its build process is distributed across a network of multiple computers. However, large networks are more likely to contain a computer that causes a build to fail. If such a computer can be identified, it can be excluded from participation. Otherwise, if the failed command can be detected, it can be retried on a different computer.

We describe our experiences designing, implementing, and maintaining a fault-tolerant distributed build process for an industrial software-development environment. We focus on techniques that augment the capabilities of available distributed-build tools.

Our build process produces Hewlett-Packard's laser printer firmware. Our environment includes hundreds of engineers, about one thousand computers, and about two million lines of code. As an example of the speedup provided by distribution, a forced sequential rebuild of all targets requiring about 155 minutes can be accomplished concurrently in about 35 minutes.

We hope to share our experiences and practices with other academics and professionals.

Paul Dyson and James Spalding - "SCM in a Large-Scale Agile Development Project"

This session will describe the presenters’ experiences of SCM on a four-year (January 2001 – September 2004) project that adopted an agile development process to deliver a global e-commerce platform for a multi-national company. The project was ground-breaking in its ‘scaling up’ of agile development (traditionally aimed at teams of no more than about ten developers) to a team of over fifty technical staff.

Agile development was adopted in order to rapidly deliver business-valuable software in an environment of unclear and ever-changing requirements. Whilst the software development of the system was rapidly a success, configuration and release management gave us many headaches. The presentation will briefly describe the agile process adopted and then focus on the SCM challenges faced due to the adoption of agile, the lessons learned, and some questions that were never satisfactorily answered.

Don Page - "Why embracing Service Management to Manage Change to your IT Infrastructure is Critical to Success"

We all know that business is becoming increasingly dependent upon Information Technology (computers) to meet business needs and achieve corporate goals. If the IT infrastructure of a business today isn't managed properly and embraces change, it’s in big trouble!

As service supply and logistics chains are becoming more complex, we rely on information technology to give us that business edge. We demand sound management information to make important business decisions faster and we need to communicate more effectively with our customers and employees, which ultimately helps to control costs.

The problem is that our IT infrastructures are continually changing to keep up with business demands and new technologies, such as the Internet. A simple change in our infrastructure can have a major financial impact on the business and customer confidence, eg, vehicles aren’t on the road, purchase orders aren’t being processed, invoices aren’t be sent out.

Don’s presentation highlights how adopting industry best practice (ITIL & BS15000) in the area of IT Service Management will help reduce business risk, embrace change and deliver a more consistent, cost effective and stable IT service.

Sally Page - "Bad Disaster Recovery Day at Symbian"

The presentation covers the learning process and implementation of a real life disaster recovery at Symbian and the resulting lessons learnt. These included the assumptions we had to deal with about ability of staff, availability of equipment, backups etc that are integral to a successful disaster recovery.

It will summarise best practice and hints and tips if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation, and how to avoid such situations in the first place!

Kevin Lee - "Agile SCM: Realising Continuous Integration"

Continuous Integration is an Extreme Programming (XP) practice for planning and integrating small changes, continually within a project. However, being able to carry out automated scheduled builds, tested and ready for deployment has long been one of the mainstays of the software development process. In this presentation we will demonstrate the benefits of continuous integration and how various tools can be configured to implement such an environment.

The tools being used will include CruiseControl/Ant (for the continuous integration toolkit) and both CVS and ClearCase (for the SCM infrastructure).

Stephen Vance and Rajul Vora - "Changing Horses in Midstream - Converting Between SCM Systems"

Conversion between software configuration management systems is fraught with pitfalls. Although the basic concepts are largely the same, there can be significant variations in how they are represented and some systems have features that do not map cleanly to other systems.

This presentation will look at the general aspects of conversion and include a case study conversion of ClearCase to Perforce completed by Stephen Vance on behalf of Rajul Vora in Fall 2003 for Barra, Inc. This presentation discusses the considerations, difficulties, successes and optimizations involved in successfully converting Barra’s multiple ClearCase sites into a single Perforce server.

David Bicket - "Applying Software Asset Management (SAM) Best Practices to Meet Corporate Governance Requirements"

This session will give an overview of evolving international corporate governance requirements and the demands they create for effective management controls over software assets. The session will also address ways of demonstrating effective controls in this area, including the possibility of being certified against the ISO/IEC 19770 draft standard on software asset management which is currently being developed.

Phil Hicks - "Release Management from Chaos"

The presentation will provide a summary of the key issues that Wall Street Systems faced with their previous release management process. It will discuss why the infrastructure that was in place stood very little chance of success and what has been done over the last 2 years to put a release management lifecycle in place. This includes the training of staff, the processes and the tools used. Wall Street Systems have just completed their third release cycle since the new release management process was introduced. The presentation will cover some of the issues encountered and lessons learnt as a result. Empirical evidence suggests a 300% improvement in quality as a result of the new release management process.

Frank Schophuizen - "From a monolithic product development to component development"

In this presentation you will hear some lessons we learned with turning a monolithic product development approach into a component development environment. After several releases for a complex and high-tech medical product, we ran into a maintenance trap: too many configurations to support and maintain, increasing complexity, degrading quality, development cycles slowing down and competitiveness suffered.

We decided to break the monolith into pieces, decoupling subsystems and developing them in parallel, smaller and faster development cycles. We changed SCM, the workflows and refactored parts of the system, and we discovered the obstacles and shortcomings of our ideas when putting them in practice. The presentation will cover some of the issues we ran into.

Steve Ransom - "The Holy Grail of Effective Change Management"

It's often said that the only constant in business is change. Yet the ability of organisations to respond to change varies wildly. Whilst most organisations now recognise that they need to be able to alter strategy in line with market shifts, new legislation and competitive pressures, this is not always reflected in their capacity to alter processes and underlying technology.

There is a need for a more integrated approach to change management, built on the principle that a single environment should be able to manage all business applications, across their entire lifecycle. In this way, changes can be made to applications cost-effectively and quickly, whenever business needs dictate. Equally importantly, these changes can be made in such a way that no functionality is compromised. The result is that instead of being a problem and indeed a major cost to the business, change management can become a means of gaining competitive advantage.

Cathy Wright - "Configuration Management and ITIL at BT"

This presentation discusses the challenges of implement CM and ITIL in an organisation the size of BT.

Phil Illingworth - "Forum: How Important are People and Career Paths Really?"

This forum will discuss aspects of careers in configuration management ranging from recruitment, training and personal development to the all important recognition and salaries. How do you become truly valued in your organisation? An open forum will allow many people to contribute.

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