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It's Hip To Be Square

Configuration management isn’t cool, but some say it’s undeniably more important than ever in a distributed services world

By Geoff Koch

November 1, 2006 — (Page 1 of 7)
Want to have some fun, or at least generate several weeks’ worth of e-mail to read? It’s easy. Find several smart people steeped in the world of software configuration management, then ask them the following question.

Because software development is becoming a more agile and process-light endeavor, isn’t configuration management decidedly less important today than it was even a few years ago? After all, the glossy business magazines declare that edge-generated innovation and services are in, while centralized and plodding control is out. And what could be more centralized and plodding than configuration management?

“The opposite is true,” said Steve Berczuk, co-author of the 2002 book “Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration” and senior software engineer at Fast Search & Transfer in Needham, Mass. “With more going on, it’s more important to be able to understand dependencies, track changes and coordinate.”

Suffice it to say that Berczuk and most of his peers seem unconcerned about any pending obsolescence. And after some amount of indignation at that suggestion passes, most of them can cite a plausible laundry list of reasons why configuration management matters more than ever.

One is the inexorable rise of standards and regulations. Another is the push toward geographically distributed development, which if anything fuels the trend toward consolidation, centralization and more integrated soup-to-nuts-type management software. The rise of Web services and service-oriented architectures, or SOAs, may in fact create new issues. But such technologies won’t necessarily solve any of the old configuration management problems, nearly all of which require competent use of a handful of well-known tools.

Yet it’s wrong to consider configuration managers to be tool freaks who never met a check-in/check-out system they didn’t like. After strenuously pointing out that some sort of tool is essential to nearly every project, most developers working in this space will emphasize that people and processes matter far more than software programs in managing a codebase.

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