Earlier this year, Kathryn Fryer and I formed a workgroup to share experiences we’ve had with customers adopting the IBM CLM configuration management solution. The purpose being to elicit our shared recommended practices and guidance. The workgroup consisted of representatives from Services, Support, Development, Test, Enablement and Product Management.
When forming your Configuration Management plan we recommend it consider the following key topics:
- End to End Process Flow (context for use of configuration management)
- Component Strategy
- Stream Strategy
- Baseline Strategy
- Change Management (including DNG change sets)
- Cross-stream Updates
- Reviews and Approvals
- Traceability, Link Validity and impact analysis
- Naming, Tagging, Custom Attribute Conventions
- Roles and Permissions
- Configuration aware Reporting
- Integrations (including non-CLM)
- Communication Plan
Our aim is to create guidance that encompasses each of these topic areas to aid you in creation of your configuration management plan.
The first such guidance is now available on jazz.net.
- CLM configuration management: Adoption guidance and practices
- CLM configuration management: Defining your component strategy
- CLM configuration management: Patterns for stream usage
- CLM configuration management: Single stream strategy
- CLM configuration management: Multistream variant strategy
- CLM configuration management: Multistream concurrent release development strategy
Our focus has been on general adoption guidance along with component and stream strategies (both are critical at the outset and go hand in hand). Next focus areas are yet to be determined but could include finishing out the stream strategies (a couple more patterns remain) baselining strategy and change management.
We value your feedback on the guidance to date and input on areas to focus on next.
If you are at the IBM Watson IoT: Continuous Engineering Summit 2017 this week in New Orleans, be sure to say hello. Check out the talk I have with Ian Zimmerman on Friday at 2:30pm (Azalea 1): CM05 – Adopting Configuration Management: What You Need to Know!
Tim Feeney's Blog on Jazz 