Configuration Management The Missing Link Inf Web Engineering

by Susan Dart

Overview

An examination of configuration management (CM) from a business value perspective. It discusses why a company's e-business and e-commerce - encompassing Web content, Web applications, back-office applications, code and data - simply will not survive or thrive without CM. The book provides an overview of CM technology, reveals best practice techniques for selecting and deploying automated CM solutions, explores nine key challenges facing e-commerce, and provides guidelines for avoiding pitfalls that can quickly derail an e-business.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781580530989
Publisher:	Artech House, Incorporated
Publication date:	10/31/2000
Series:	Computing Library
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Susan Dart is currently principal, application lifecycle management at Pretzel Logic. She is a CM evangelist and consultant with 24 years of experience in software tools and development and technology adoption. Her unique experience spans academia and industry and includes positions in software and tool development, sales, research, and executive management for a leading CM tool vendor. A well-known speaker at international seminars and conferences, and the author of an earlier book on CM and more than 60 professional papers, she received her B.Sc. from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, her M.Sc. in Software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Her background includes seven years at the Software Engineering Institute.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: The Internet Is a Fabulous Invention, But...

The future and some good advice

Companies are growing larger because of mergers. Pre-Internet, the client-server world gave us many distributed, disjointed development environments and tools. The trend to mergers creating incredibly huge companies will push the industry back into a more centralized, enterprise-wide focus. This will have a profound effect on their software and Web development environments. Companies will make more enterprise-wide tool decisions leaning toward a uniform tool set rather than group-specific ones that encourage a plethora of different tools.

I encourage you to get the best possible CM solution for your company so that you can garner its benefits while avoiding the Web crisis. Do it now. Buy the best tools. Cheap tools sometimes create more headaches than they are worth. Better tools cost more. What price are you willing to put on the success of your Web system?

Do not be afraid to automate processes. Good tools that automate processes and are tightly integrated will take time to deploy. Put your best people on these activities. You cannot afford to have your Web systems fail. Get the best development and maintenance environment possible. This will take time and resources. In the meantime, put top priority focus on your CM solution. Yes, you need your Web tools such as HTML editors and testing tools, but as soon as your CM is in place, the potential for mistakes is immediately reduced and you have a solid foundation for all future development along with maintenance of legacy systems.

You merely have to look to some statistics to realize that the challenges will escalate. Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell Computer Corp., predicts that there will be $4 trillion in annual Internet business transactions and 500 million Internet users by 2003 [27]. Similarly, Vinton G. Cerf, "father" of the Internet, predicts that by 2006, more than 900 million electronic devices will be linked to the Internet, equaling the number of telephones in the world [26]. Behind these transactions and devices, much Web development and maintenance will have to take place.

Be proactive and win!

Companies need to be proactive and include CM as part of their infrastructure. Do not make the typical mistake of being reactive, of ignoring CM until the Web crisis problems hit. The consequences, recovery time, and lost time cannot be removed. Your competitor can use your lost time to overtake you as market leader. Prepare well for the future now because at some point in time, technology, network infrastructure, and security won't be the battle. Technology will become ubiquitous. Content will be the battleground. If you have a solid maintenance support system via use of CM, then your company can easily pass through the battleground without too much collateral damage.

An outline of each chapter

This book is not about the low-level technical details of Web coding (such as how to write efficient Java code) or of CM implementation (such as how to branch and merge five variants). Such answers are readily available from books or a Web tool or CM tool vendor. Most of the how-to technical issues already have answers that can be easily found because CM has been around for about 30 years. My goal with this book is to raise awareness and highlight the key business issues and technical challenges that have not been brought to industry's attention. Those are the issues that get companies into trouble. My goal is to point companies in the right direction by avoiding the common pitfalls, by pointing out the issues that they need to take into account, and by optimizing their efforts to get the best possible CM solution. I see companies making typical mistakes that can be easily avoided.

This book explains how to articulate your Web needs and problems and then define your CM requirements so that you can choose the best CM tool and deploy the best CM solution throughout your organization.

This book does not tell you which is the best CM tool or vendor because there is no such thing. A tool is good when it suits the needs of users, and there are so many different kinds of users and needs in the world that every tool has its value. Also, I do not want to focus on specific tools because it is the CM concepts that are important and timeless. Those concepts are implemented in the tools in different ways. CM tools will evolve, vendors will get acquired and products dissolve, and eventually, the CM industry per se will "die" or, rather, CM will become ubiquitous. By this I mean that eventually IDES will have embedded CM capabilities along with their software tools. Thus, CM will eventually provide the infrastructure for integration with a full suite of tools (requirements, testing, traffic monitoring, site administration, help desks, software distribution tools, and so on). Eventually, CM will be a fundamental capability in IDES rather than one you have to add.

This chapter is designed to whet your appetite about the spectrum of issues covered in this book. It is also designed to lay the groundwork as to the importance of e-commerce and e-business to the world and how it has changed the way we used to do business and, hence, why companies must be proactive with their CM solutions. The Internet is not going away. It is only going to get bigger, bolder, and faster. Without CM, companies will struggle.

Chapter 2 focuses directly on the nature of the Web. It explains further why the Internet is no fad. I look at the four phases that companies go through in developing and maintaining their Web systems, along with a detailed description of the nine key challenges that companies face in addressing the Web crisis. Categories of problems or mistakes are presented that indicate a company has hit some kind of Web crisis. I look at what is driving companies to a Web crisis point, along with the complex nature of Web systems themselves. The chapter concludes with how Web programming is different from traditional software programming.

Chapter 3 gives a detailed discussion of what I mean by configuration management, why the world has so many interpretations of CM, why CM is not a "sexy" topic, the business value and benefits of CM, why companies are driven to a CM solution, signs that there are CM problems, and the role it plays in standards such as the Capability Maturity Model Integration and ISO 9000. 1 focus on the operational areas of CM, including version and configuration control, configuration item structuring, construction of configuration items, change management, teamwork support, process management, auditing, and status reporting.

Chapter 4 focuses on the key aspects related to CM tools and the vendors. It shows the spectrum of users and, hence, the spectrum of products. The two types of tools-evolutionary versus full process-are discussed. It ends by answering commonly asked questions such as which tool is best and what the ROI is for a CM tool...

Table of Contents

	Preface	xv
	Acknowledgments	xvii
	The Internet Is a Fabulous Invention, But...	1
	The beginnings of maintenance problems	5
	The Web crisis consequence	6
	The Web changes everything	9
	Speed has changed everything	10
	Companies that embraced the Web created new opportunities	12
	Companies that ignored the Web are paying the price	16
	We need Web engineering	18
	Companies are busy now	19
	The future and some good advice	21
	Be proactive and win!	22
	An outline of each chapter	22
	Why I wrote this book	24
	The audience for this book	26
	Key messages from this chapter	26
	The Nature of the World Wide Web	29
	The Internet rules!	30
	The beauty and potential of the Web	31
	The phases of Web acceptance	34
	Initial focus for companies concerning their Web systems	36
	Mistakes are made too easily and are very costly	37
	The Web crisis	40
	What is driving the Web crisis?	42
	Web systems can be very complex	44
	Web system architecture and terminology	48
	Nine key Web crisis challenges	52
	Speed of change challenge	52
	Variant explosion challenge	54
	Dynamic content challenge	56
	Process support challenge	58
	Performance effect challenge	60
	Scalability challenge	61
	Outsourcing challenge	61
	Politics challenge	62
	Immaturity challenge	63
	Summary of the nine challenges	64
	Signs of a crisis point	65
	The nature of Web programming	65
	Key messages from this chapter	68
	Understanding the Many Views of Configuration Management	73
	Configuration management is configuration management regardless of object type	74
	The essence of configuration management: Key notions and terms	78
	An everyday example	78
	The old view and the new view of configuration management	80
	Typical software development and maintenance life cycles	81
	Software engineering models	82
	The value and benefits of configuration management	83
	Business and technical benefits	85
	Signs of a configuration management problem	87
	What drives companies to a configuration management solution	88
	How success drives companies to configuration management	89
	Unified view of configuration management	93
	The eight functional areas of software configuration management	94
	Version and configuration control	96
	Configuration item structuring	97
	Construction of configurations	98
	Change management	98
	Teamwork support	100
	Process management	101
	Auditing	101
	Status reporting	102
	Key decisions companies must make, or mistakes I see too often	102
	Key messages from this chapter	103
	The Automation of Configuration Management	107
	Automated, not manual, configuration management	109
	Spectrum of configuration management tools	109
	Not all configuration management tools are the same	111
	CM for Web teams	112
	Lightweight versus heavyweight tools	114
	Dynamic content	115
	Component library management	116
	What the configuration management vendors are doing	116
	What is the best configuration management tool?	118
	Enterprise-wide solution or project-specific solution?	119
	Relationship to other disciplines and tools	121
	Concepts, or architectural elements, in configuration management tools	124
	Versions	124
	Repository	127
	Workspaces	127
	System models	128
	Builds	128
	Relationships	128
	Change requests	129
	Change life cycles	129
	Change sets	129
	Processes	130
	Tasks	130
	Audit trail	131
	The death and resurrection of the configuration management industry	131
	Key messages from this chapter	132
	Configuration Management Tool Selection and Deployment	135
	Configuration management opens up a can of worms	137
	Size matters, but it does not change how adoption is done	137
	Quick and dirty adoption or methodical adoption?	138
	The good, the bad, and the ugly about adoption	140
	Why companies fail at adopting a configuration management solution	141
	The model of the configuration management solution	143
	Sequence of steps in the configuration management solution	146
Step 1	Select teams	147
Step 2	Create the sponsorship strategy	150
Step 3	Capture the status of configuration management today	151
Step 4	Define the configuration management vision	152
Step 5	Specify the configuration management benefits	152
Step 6	Assess readiness to change	153
Step 7	Define configuration management requirements	154
Step 8	Do risk management	156
Step 9	Define the selection method	157
Step 10	Make the strategic decisions	158
Step 11	Submit the request for proposal to the vendors	158
Step 12	Conduct candidate tool demonstrations	159
Step 13	Pick the finalist tool(s)	160
Step 14	Develop a CM plan or describe CM processes	160
Step 15	Do proof-of-concept pilot(s)	162
Step 16	Pick the CM tool	165
Step 17	Complete risk mitigation	165
Step 18	Schedule roll-out	166
Step 19	Train users	166
Step 20	Prepare the CM tool	167
Step 21	Manage resistance	167
Step 22	Gather lessons learned	171
	How long are the tool selection and adoption going to take?	172
	ROI and useful metrics	173
	How can we recover from tool adoption failure, or turn "shelfware" into "UseWare"?	176
	The value of configuration management vendors	177
	The big gap regarding standards	180
	Should the tool follow the process or should the process follow the tool?	181
	Key messages from this chapter	182
	Case Studies in Configuration Management Automation of Web Systems	185
	What I did	186
	The messages and best practices	186
	Case study: Carclub.com	189
	Its CM system and environment	189
	CM process	190
	Minimizing mistakes in publishing	191
	CM adoption and benefits	191
	The evolving CM solution	191
	Messages and lessons learned	192
	Case study: eCampus.com	192
	Configuration management goals	193
	Development and maintenance life cycles	193
	Managing changes	194
	Messages and lessons learned	195
	Case study: EDS	196
	The nature of the CM solution	197
	Creation layer	197
	Collection layer	198
	CM layer	199
	Compilation and distribution layer	199
	Deployment layer	199
	Configuration items	200
	Configuration item life cycle	201
	Managing changes to client Web sites	202
	Adoption of the CM solution	203
	Evolution of its CM solution	203
	Messages and lessons learned	203
	Case study: Lockheed Martin Aeronautical Systems	204
	The environment and CM goals	204
	CM processes	205
	Evolution of its CM solution	205
	Messages and lessons learned	206
	Case study: Lycos	206
	Messages and lessons learned	209
	Case study: NASD	210
	NASD's goals for its CM solution	210
	CM infrastructure	210
	CM processes	211
	Change management	211
	Web content support	214
	Problems it was having and benefits that CM brought it	215
	Further CM evolution	216
	Adoption of the CM solution	216
	Messages and lessons learned	218
	Case study: OneSource Information Services Inc.	219
	Problems solved and benefits gained	219
	Infrastructure	220
	Workflow and change management	220
	Deployment	221
	Messages and lessons learned	221
	Case study: USinternetworking	222
	Problems solved and benefits offered by its CM solution	222
	Change management	224
	Company organizational layout	225
	Messages and lessons learned	226
	Appendix A	229
A.1	Configuration management questionnaire	230
A.2	Categories of configuration management requirements	240
A.3	Categories of risks	240
A.4	Process description	244
A.5	Types of process or process levels	245
A.6	Example of a CM process model	245
	Description of the roles in the states	247
	Description of the roles in the transitions	247
	Description of the states	247
A.7	Template for configuration management status report	253
	Executive summary	253
	People's understanding or definition of CM	254
	Problems found in our development and maintenance practices and tools	254
	Goals or visions people have for a better solution	254
	Why CM is important to this company	254
	Recommendations regarding CM	254
A.8	Template for risk management plan	255
	Executive summary	255
	Detailed description of the risks	256
	Lessons learned	257
A.9	Template for a pilot project plan	258
	Success criteria and expectations	258
	Why was this project chosen to be the pilot?	258
	Scope of the pilot project	259
	Schedule	259
	Risks and concerns	259
	Process models	259
	Training materials	259
	Vendor interaction	261
	Lessons learned and data captured	261
	About the Author	263
	Index	265

Editorial Reviews

Consultant Dart raises awareness of the lack of good software engineering principles when companies develop Web sites, and offers configuration management as the solution. Her topics include the nature of the World Wide Web, the various views of configuration management, automation, selecting and deploying tools, and case studies. She writes for company managers as well as Web developers. No information is provided about the disk. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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