Sat in marketing meeting listening to presentation on how to market to developers.  Developers = irrational monkeys that want respect!  Best way to market to them is to have a product with no alternative available.  The things we spend our time doing - Best way to get word out to developers is to provide best product and to get them talking about it.  No wonder developers are dismissive of marketing!

Workflow or process automation has taken pride of place in the application lifecycle (ALM) arena of late, and quite rightly.  Customers and vendors have realized there is more to managing code than tracking and versioning.

Overtime the underlying development languages and environments have moved towards the user and minimized the need to know the details of the underlying machine. Object oriented techniques and IDE’s are examples of this, and most developers today work in such a space.

This virtualization has not taken place in the build area and it remains a magic art at many unenlightened  companies, outside the bounds of control. Many project plans ignore or even forget the build, config and deploy steps in their program time an resource estimates, causing last minute panics and over-time at the end of many projects! But why fix it - we have all lived with this for years.

It matters today for three reasons:

1. New programming techniques such as Agile are increasing demand for non-redundant, repeatable, automatic builds.
2. Internal audit is oft uncovering the fact that build / release management is not repeatable, traceable nor is there separation of duties.
3. One key test of the ability of an organization to manage its home grown software is how quickly it can respond to production issues. These can often be more costly than missing a delivery commitment in the first place. Every configuration in production needs to directly point not only to the source code that produced it, or the environment in which it resides but also the libraries (application, opensource etc) that it utilized. Only the actual build step really knows what is in the binaries.

These three problems can be addressed by virtualizing scripts up to a template / build method that is abstracted to a degree that minimizes the environment and hardware and for that matter the compilers. By using build methods the management software (build management)  inherently achieves the benefits of build reuse, auditability and dependency discovery.

Some vendors claim that these benefits can be achieved with a process automation tool - most notably IBM / Build Forge and Electric Cloud. This is a step in the right direction but amounts to trying to herd cats, for if you do not virtualize the build scripts you are attempting to manage chaos with a process - it may look good for a while but will surely break.

Great thing about the Mac is that spell checker is part of the O/S. In Microsoft this is not the case so when you use a blogging tool like Blogg-X you end up giving the impression that you cant spell!!

Now with Live Writer front ended to WordPress I am set to go.