This is from a recent project at a multinational retail company. The company is using a corporate RUP adaptation since a few years back. However most projects have interpreted this in a way that mostly resembles a waterfall approach, having clear hand-offs and not being very iterative.

My role in this project was configuration manager. They were particularly looking for experience in handling several parallell releases within different states of development, since there was a lack of this in the project. I helped them set up an infrastructure and a process supporting this, within the frames of their existing development process RUP. However I suggested them to have fewer parallell development tracks but more frequent releases, instead of having many long parallell releases.

Another problem I discovered was the project management were making project plans far beyond the horizon of predictability, and where at the same time very eager to deliver on schedule. This meant that they were having lots of slack in their plans, and thus periodically lots of unutilized resources. Having an agile process and being adaptive to changes would remove the slack and also getting more frequent feedback from the busiess side of the project.

I tried to introduce agile ideas into the project and had the full support from the development team, but unfortunately not enough support from the project management. The developers actually introduced continuous integration and CruiseControl.

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You can download the slides from the Lean CM breakfast seminar. (There is some minor problem with the headlines coming from the pdf-generator, but it should be readable anyway.)

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As a part of Lund Software Days SNESCM are inviting people from the academic world as well as the industry with an interest in CM to exchange experiences and ideas. In Lund, 18th october.

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This morning I presented my Lean CM presentation to locally interested people. 26 people showed up and most of them where satisfied with what they got. However some had hoped for more details in the presentation, but unfortunately the time frame given to me didn’t allow for a more detailed presentation. But hey, that gives us a reason for meeting again.

I feel that there is a curiosity and a growing interest in agile ideas in the area. Hopefully this will eventually also reach management.

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When Jeff Sutherland visited us for Øresund Agile earlier this year we also made an interview with him. Read part 1 of the interview where we discuss team performance and team sizes.

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Here is the abstract of my paper and also my seminar in about a week.

“Configuration management, as a discipline for supporting software development, has been around for half a century and has evolved into standard practice within traditional software development processes. One of the key purposes of configuration management is to control changes made to the software product.

Agile development methods are becoming increasingly popular and claim to embrace change. These methods put emphasis on responsiveness to change rather than controlling change. How can these contradicting methodologies co-exist in the one and same project? This paper investigates the integration of configuration management and agile methods by introducing the concept of Lean Configuration Management, and shows how this can support an increased return on investment of the software project.

While traditional configuration management evolves around controlling changes of a forecasted plan, lean configuration management is about handling changes in an adaptive way as well as supporting the values of agile development and lean principles.”

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