Every organization has a plan that consists of the details of day-to-day operation. With the rapid developments in technology, there are a lot of project management techniques and performance examining tools available. Many organizations fall victim to is the lack of the proper Software Configuration Management (SCM) processes for their portal projects and ongoing support models.
What is Software Configuration Management (SCM)?
Software Configuration Management (SCM) consists of processes and tools that manages and controls the development process. It maintains the existing state of the software, while allowing developers to work on innovative features or new versions. Without software configuration management, the source code would become unorganized, resulting in development that would be unfeasible. The purpose of SCM is to increase the speed and excellence of software development by catching inaccuracies near the beginning and enabling immediate fixes when they take place.
Importance of SCM for Portal Projects
It’s vital to consider the upfront investment involving the design of right SCM processes. In general, once the portal project starts, there is a considerable amount of time spent. The configuration of the infrastructure used to support the portal environment involves development, testing, and staging. SCM has the following advantages:
• Speeds up the return on investment of your portal.
• Helps to ease design gaps between the SCM processes and portal environment configuration.
• In case you are utilizing Subject Matter Experts (SME), both your existing environment and software teams can be merged with the SMEs. As a result, it will help give the SMEs the right control of both the technical as well as organizational environments within your business.
Best Practices involving SCM
Together with an organizational pattern plan, the base of an efficient SCM (Software Configuration Management) incorporates the following set of principles:
- Use only a few code lines as possible
One of the key values of SCM is to wipe out redundancy and addition issues. The best approach to development should be the utilization of only a few code lines, and only branching when certain limitations crop up.
- Early and Frequent Testing
For good SCM, early testing is essential. It’s important to engage in testing earlier than code is released to the next pattern in the chain of command. Furthermore, performance testing can be performed exactly and frequently on your workstation with specific performance tools.
- Tests involving Integration
Most private workstations allow developers to test integration earlier than their actual integration with the main line. This can help manage any changes that may crop up.
- Organization’s development infrastructure
The SCM system altogether consists of the policies necessary to get used to the SCM tool. In other words, the organization must consider all the ways regarding the implementation of the SCM tool for its development infrastructure.
- Modern software repository hosting tools
Each repository hosting tool offers a different kind of support for the underlying software version control systems. You need to use these tools to replicate your main workstation, along with the new branches.
Creating the right SCM processes early in your portal project is very important. As a result, they can help you with decreasing costs a well as downstream risk. Furthermore, this activity should be carried out in parallel with your portal environment’s configuration, so as to speed up the ROI of your portal venture.
