fbpx
1-888-310-4540 (main) / 1-888-707-6150 (support) info@spkaa.com
Select Page

Bad Changeset Management, Release Management Can Be Disastrous for Your Company

The core activities of configuration management (i.e. changeset management and release management) are essential to control the changes made to a system and to administer the release of its different versions. However getting it wrong damages your brand, customer confidence and ultimately your business.

Changeset Management

All software systems change but how that change is managed will determine the success of the change. At the simplest level, software is changed to fix bugs and address security vulnerabilities. No new functionality is added but the software is more reliable, more stable and more secure. Tracking these changes (bug fixes) means that at any time the impact (both in terms of functionality and cost) can be monitored and subsequently fed into the release management process.

How changes are managed shouldn’t be decided by which tools are available, but rather tools should be found and used according to the management principles. Although tools can improve efficiency, it’s ultimately the nature of the process that determines the success of change management.

Back in the 1990s Abracadabra Software, a popular accounting software solution company, discovered that it’s the process rather than the tool that’s important. Here’s why: A programmer working on the next version of the AbraPay software made a change to the code without following the change management process. The change was simple – only one line of code. However it introduced a major bug into the software.

Since the change was made just days before the final shipping version of the product was released, it made its way into the release and subsequently broke the software. Hundreds of calls started to flood into the company when the software failed to work as expected. The AbraPay team then had to work all through the night to find, fix, test and release a new version of the software.

The lesson is that changeset management can fail, not because of the tools, but because of the process and the people using that process. Good changeset management needs to be easy to use, efficient but effective. Any process that causes the developers pain will be circumvented. It’s human nature.

Client-server or peer-to-peer

Naturally, the tools used do play important roles and the methodology behind the tools is equally important. In deciding which methodology and tool to use it’s worth noting the difference between two models of revision control. The first and oldest is a client-server model where source code is synchronized with a central repository. How that synchronizing occurs, and if concurrent changes are allowed, depend on the individual software.

The alternative is a peer-to-peer model known as distributed revision control. Here the synchronization of changes is done from peer to peer. This means that there is no central repository but rather many working copies (which also act as backups of the codebase).

Release Management

After changes have been made to a system, a new version of the software needs to be released. Release management is the process of governing the releases and managing what’s included in that release. The input from the changeset management process is used to produce the version for release. Other inputs into this process include the documentation (including release notes) and configuration data when building for multiple platforms.

Conclusion

Manage the changes, monitor the changes, get the releases out with the right code included and your business has a chance at success. Ship the wrong code with unknown, unquantifiable changes and your business is headed for disaster.

Latest White Papers

How CloudBees Uses Feature Management to Gain Competitive Advantage

How CloudBees Uses Feature Management to Gain Competitive Advantage

In this whitepaper, you’ll discover how CloudBees Feature Management Flags can help you gain a competitive advantage in the market.  Discover CloudBees Feature Management In this CloudBees Feature flag whitepaper, you’ll learn: How to increase your developer...

Related Resources

Salesforce Migrates DevOps to the Cloud with CloudBees CI

Salesforce Migrates DevOps to the Cloud with CloudBees CI

Industry:  Software Geography: Global Salesforce empowers software developers to create high-quality, secure enterprise apps on its Force.com platform by moving development operations to the cloud using CloudBees CI and Amazon EKS. Challenge: Migrate app development...

STRATTEC Security Corporation’s PTC Windchill PLM ROI Case Study

STRATTEC Security Corporation’s PTC Windchill PLM ROI Case Study

STRATTEC Security Corporation deployed PTC Windchill to replace its existing product lifecycle management (PLM) solution. Additionally, they wanted to improve product design tracking and collaboration. Nucleus found that PTC Windchill PLM enables increased...

Moving Code Corp to the Atlassian Cloud

Moving Code Corp to the Atlassian Cloud

Code Corp has around 250 users of their Atlassian suite and specializes in high-performance barcode readers and scanning software. This hardware and software provide data capture for many different industries and use cases. Additionally, they power track-and-trace...