Perforce Software

Title of the presentation: Coding control: how to bring in agility and avoid fragility through software configuration management

Level: beginners

Day and time: Thursday, 29th of October, 09:50am - 10:35am

Room: Paris

Abstract: Offshoring, outsourcing, remote working and the increasingly global nature of many organisations have combined to make the software development process more complex than ever. Developers working on different versions of programs in different time zones, poor visibility of the state of the project, inability to review earlier builds, and general lack of control are common complaints. Many organisations try to manage such situations with Software Configuration Management (SCM) systems.

This is a laudable goal as SCM systems are clearly intended to solve these problems, but when implemented incorrectly they merely introduce the illusion of control by creating excessive process and increasing the separateness of distributed teams, resulting in a slow, inflexible, and fragile, development organisation. This is clearly the reverse of what's required and in this presentation we highlight the approaches that lead inevitably to failure and describe the path to distributed SCM success.

Tony Smith is European Technical Director for Perforce Software. He is responsible for the provision of Training and Consulting services to Perforce users across Europe. He is an experienced developer and in addition to his management responsibilities, he also undertakes some development of the Perforce SCM system.