TEAM Zarate Tarrani Notes From the Field

Software Process Improvement. There are three outstanding sources of information for SPI:

1. David F. Rico's home page.
2. Tantra Management Services.
3. European Software Process Improvement.

The last one contains documents by categories ranging from assessments to strategies and is one of the best collections of information I've seen in a long time.

Software Configuration Management. The clearest overview of SCM that I've found is on a University of Calgary page for a software engineering class. This page also has a PowerPoint presentation on software configuration management that is excellent.

Configuration Management for Software by Stephen B. Compton and Guy Conner is the best book I've read on SCM. This wonderful book was out of print, but a quick check on Amazon shows that it is once again available. If you get one book on SCM this is the one I recommend.

Another source of SCM information, along with software engineering processes by CMM key process area is the Systems Engineering Process Office maintained by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego. Their document collection is mostly in MS Word and PowerPoint formats.

An Old Friend. Linda and I have a document that we frequently cite. It's titled Life Cycle Quality Gates and provides key metrics for every phase of the development life cycle, with attention paid to production (a phase that is too often ignored). Another of our old standbys, titled Configuration Management - The Big Picture, is a quick reference guide for configuration, change and release management. We've included both the technical and business value of each facet of configuration, change and release management, which is a starting point analyzing the ROI that will result from establishing and managing these critical processes.

Project Management. I've written three fairly comprehensive articles in the 9, 10 and 12 May entries in Postcards from the Revolution. If PM is a topic of interest you should read the articles.