Ibm Rational Clearcase 7.0: Master The Tools That Monitor, Analyze, And Manage Software Configurations
by Marc Girod /
2011 / English / PDF
5 MB Download
Both of us are essentially developers. One way or another, we took charge of building the software for our colleagues, and gradually moved into making this our main job. We have been involved in support and maintenance evaluation, planning, and advocacy installation and updates design and implementation of customizations, and even to some extent, in design and implementation of enhancements and prototyping what could be a new SCM tool. Fundamentally,
we remained developers.
We know that developers are creative and passionate people who do not like to be disturbed and who want to focus on their work, which is often at the limit of their own skills. These people are likely to leave to others mundane issues of planning, organization, politics. This is of course dangerous and often abused. One problem is that under the word communications one too often means either propaganda, or secret diplomacy and information concealing. Information doesn't flow well through the mediation of people who share neither the concerns nor the competences. This is not only an issue of conspiracy: there is something structural in the fact that competences, and even the concerns, are not being shared. Competences get acquired slowly, as a by-product of dedication and investment, and this process inevitably results in specialization. It is not simply a matter of e-learning.
We are deeply concerned about the future, the present, and the past of SCM. For what we witness, neither the efficiency nor the quality of software development have improved in the last period, and the trends are bleak.
Main stream solutions are always dull. It becomes worrisome when one can identify forces that drive them towards obviously wrong directions. This is how we analyze the excessive value given to visualization, and which in fact aims at making ignorance socially acceptable. Visual interfaces hide more than they show, and they do it on generic bases, which does not serve the specific needs of specialists. Their opacity is often overwhelmingly hard to reverse-engineer.
