The Build Master Book - Microsoft's SCM Best Practices
Well I know I've been lame about getting this blog started but I have been very pre-occupied with writing a build book -
"The Build Master" will be complete at the end of January 2005 and be available from Addison-Wesley in March 2005.
(IN MICROSOFT FASHION THE RELEASE HAS SLIPPED TO JULY - edited post Feb 27, sorry)
Contents at a Glance:
- Source Code Control – The “Golden” Rule.
- Since it seems that the build team on a project tends to live in the source code trees and are usually the administrators of the trees, I spend a chapter talking about the best way to configure your sources.
- The Build Process – The Mission Critical Assembly Line.
- The heart and soul of this book. Nine chapters dedicated to covering, in detail, how to build your product. For a more in depth overview please read the book’s introduction.
- Deployment/Release – Ship It!
- This is another area that tends to spillover to the build team’s responsibilities that is covered in three chapters.
- Sustained Engineering – The only sure things in life: “Death, Taxes, and Bugs.”
- If you are struggling with your build process, this usually tends to be the first area that symptoms of a failing project start to show up. Most notably everyone on the project team is in ‘reactive mode’ instead of working on new features.
- The Future – How to Get There from Here
- I give some suggestions on how to influence upper management to make the correct tough decisions in your organization that help you do your job easier.
- If you are interested in the new tools that Microsoft will be releasing with the future release of Visual Studio, I touch on how to utilize those tools using the processes described in this book.
This book will be based on the 15 years I've been at Microsoft and the various Software Configuration Management roles I've been in.
Although some of the examples in the book are with Microsoft tools and technologies, I have tried to write this book in a tool agnostic way. In other words, irregardless of the tools or platforms that you develop on, you will still be able to use these processes to ship your software very effectively.
stay tuned for more...
