Ask The Expert: Agile Methodology, Continuous Integration and SCM

Damon Poole is Founder and CTO of AccuRev. Mr. Poole has eighteen years of software development methodology and process improvement experience spanning the gamut from small collocated teams to organizations with 10,000 globally distributed developers. He is President of the Agile Bazaar, writes and speaks frequently on the topic of Agile development, and as one of the product owners of AccuRev works closely with customers developing and implementing state of the art Agile techniques which scale efficiently to large distributed teams. In addition to Agile development, Mr. Poole specializes in software configuration management (SCM), lifecycle management and release management. He has spoken at numerous software development and Agile-related conferences, including SD Best Practices, Software Test & Performance, SCQAA, Q-Con, EclipseCon, Deep Lean, Agile Bazaar, and Agile 2008. He earned his BS in Computer Science at the University of Vermont in 1987.

Question of the Week

Q: How does a software configuration management tool help with Continuous Integration?

A: A software configuration management tool such as AccuRev enables continuous integration though several important features. AccuRev's stream architecture allows for easy creation and management of a multistage continuous integration code hierarchy. This provides build and release managers with the ability to build code at various stages in the development process and to control visually how code moves from development to test through release

Change packages that enable engineering, build and release managers to quickly determine which logical changes are present in a given release stream, eliminating time-consuming file-based manual processes that delay software releases.

Learn more about Continuous Integration on Damon Poole's Blog »

Questions are reviewed each week. Answers to the best questions will be posted to the website.