I am currently in the midst of writing up a special report on Build Management, which will hit theatres October 1st.

One of the main themes that folks I’ve interviewed so far have discussed is the complexity that development teams encounter when first dipping their feet into agile development. Executives called agile development a change-infested, constantly moving environment.   

“What people encounter when they try to move to agile is that there’s a tremendous amount of moving parts and a lot of variance in the build,” said Usman Muzaffar, vice president of product management for Electric Cloud. “There’s a reason why these things aren’t that easy to script and automate, and what you need is a tool that can handle that complexity without asking you to change your process.”

Tracy Ragan, COO of OpenMake, agreed with that notion and said developers struggle when they try to compile as a unit. This is due to many developers coming from a waterfall approach, in which they had more time to correct scripts.

“In the waterfall approach, you would literally freeze a branch and say ‘nobody can do anything until we get this working,’” Ragan said. “That kind of habit has to be removed, you can’t do that and call yourself agile.”

The special report will have much more from many other companies on how build management can chop away at some of the complexity within agile development.