The CM Journal article’s list is as follows:

• 1. Use of Change Packages
• 2. Stream-based Branching Strategy - do not overload branching
• 3. Status flow for all records with Clear In Box Assignments
• 4. Data record Owner and Assignee
• 5. Continuous integration with automated nightly builds from the CM repository
• 6. Dumb numbering
• 7. Main branch per release vs Main Trunk
• 8. Enforce change traceability to Features/Problem Reports
• 9. Automate administration to remove human error
• 10.Tailor your user interface closely to your process
• 11. Org chart integrated with CM tool
• 12. Change control of requirements
• 13. Continuous Automation
• 14. Warm-standby disaster recovery
• 15. Use Live data CRB/CIB meetings
• 16. A Problem is not a problem until it’s in the CM repository
• 17. Use tags and separate variant code into separate files
• 18a. Separate Problems/Issues/Defects from Activities/Features/Tasks
• 18b. Separate customer requests from Engineering problems/features
• 19. Change promotion vs Promotion Branches
• 20. Separate products for shared code

The ITMPI Journal articles lists just 3 best practices:

• Software Configuration Management Audits (This isn’t really covered well by the 20 practices above, but is somewhat related to practices 5 and 13.)
• Risk-Based Configuration Control - Balancing Flexibility with Stability (This is somewhat related to practices 7, 11, 15, 16, 18a/b, and 19.)
• Bidirectional Requirements Traceability (This is somewhat related to practices 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, and 12.)

The ITMPI Journal article doesn’t really cover the practices 6, 9, 10, 14, 17, and 20, partly because the CM journal article practices are at a lower level of detail and cover a few practical/administrative issues outside of the core of CM theory.

Anyway, the practices in both these lists are all “good” for “most” development groups. They aren’t rocket science, but I’d say there are a fair number of development groups out there that barely do any of them. Although version control is ubiquitous in industry, CM is still very poorly understood by most practitioners.

For what it’s worth, I think that for most commercial software development, the most important practice isn’t about sophisticated version control issues or processes - it’s a simple but critical piece of organisational structure and policy.

All Customer Deliveries Go Through the Release Team
Create a release team that’s different to the development team. Ensure all customer software deliveries happen through the release team. Have the most senior manager you can find declare it a firing offense for a developer to ship code or patches directly from their desktop to the customer. Even in “emergency” situations.

More than once I’ve seen or heard of companies that own high-end commercial SCM tools, but make those tools worthless because developers sometimes email patches directly to the customer. (Sometimes in the rush they also forget to check in their changes to version control, which just makes the nightmare worse.) The developers are usually trying to “get the job done”, and be “helpful” to a customer with a problem. Sadly, they end up causing bigger problems for everyone down the line. If you’re not managing releases properly, you don’t know what code the customer has - you degrade your ability to diagnose faults, you won’t be able to ship working patches in future, and you might easily introduce a regression problem by losing the fix itself.

The recipe e.g. for strawberries or whole fruit, creates a very thick syrupy cordial - thick enough to use as a topping for icrecream. Add water if you want a thinner cordial more similar to a shop-bought one.

Somewhat surprisingly to me, microwaving dry white sugar (below) does work. But, be careful. Your microwave may have a different power, the bowl will become super-hot, and you need to periodically stir the sugar, or it will melt around the edges. Also, when you add super-hot sugar to the fruit puree, be ready for the puree to instantly boil. Personally, I don’t microwave the sugar - I just chuck it into the puree cold, then boil the lot of it…

Generic Cordial Recipe

• To make 7x litres of cordial, use:
  5x litres of fruit puree (see below)
  5x kg of white sugar
  63x grams of citric acid (i.e. 9 grams/litre)

• Heat puree to boil and remove from heat
  Heat sugar in microwave (5 mins/kg)
• Combine all ingredients, stir until dissolved
• Bring to boil, boil until satisfied with sterilization (5 mins?)
• Cool until cold enough to pour into sterilized bottles

Fruit Purees

Ginger: use 100g ginger root per litre of finished cordial (i.e. per 5/7 lire of puree). Grate ginger root, boil with some water until soft (pressure-cook for 40 mins)?, puree in blender (two 30-sec bursts?), then make up planned quantity with water.
Strawberry: Use hulled strawberries and no added water. Don’t boil, mash before blending.
Passionfruit: Use pulp of 1 large passionfruit per 100ml of puree. Boil with some water (or pressure cook) for say 20 minutes to release pulp from seeds. Sieve to remove seeds, puree in blender, add water to achieve planned quantity.
Pineapple, mandarin, …: (boil, add water only as needed)

Cordials with Ginger
Make ginger cordial from ginger puree as above and blend with other cordial to taste (40% ginger cordial?)

On one hand, it’s great to cited! On the other hand, I worry that the results could be mis-interpreted. Specifically, people might be tempted to mis-read the paper as saying “small companies can’t do CMMI”. We don’t say that. So, I thought I’d try to clarify a few points here…

The main question we do provide some initial evidence for is:

• When companies decide not to do CMMI, why do they say “no”?

Here’s some questions we don’t provide evidence for in the paper:

• Do most companies do CMMI?
• Can most companies do CMMI?
• Do most companies think they can do CMMI?

(These are alternate “complementary research questions” - by saying what my main research question is NOT, I hope you get a better understanding about the boundaries of the main question, and how to interpret the results.)

In looking at the main question, we broke down the companies by size to see if we could get hints about why companies gave the reasons they did. Small companies tended to give different kinds of reasons than medium and large companies. Roughly, small companies said they couldn’t do CMMI, whereas medium and large companies said they shouldn’t.

But obviously some small companies can do CMMI! There are fairly credible reports of it in the literature. So, what’s going on?

What’s going on is that my target population is not “all software companies”. My target population is software companies that have decided not to do CMMI. To start my research, I first exclude companies that are doing CMMI, or that want to do it.

It’s interesting to progressively partition the population of companies, and think about where most software process improvement research happens. (This looks better as an animation, so think about these pictures as a sort of flick book in your mind’s eye.)

First, there’s the population of every organisation that might reasonably use CMMI.

Some of them will not have heard of CMMI, but some will have. You could study the differences between these groups as a piece of advertising or diffusion research, but I’m not aware of anyone who’s published research on this for CMMI or any other SPI approach.

Of the organisations that have heard of CMMI, some will have decided not to adopt it, and some will have decided to adopt it. This is the point in the adoption lifecycle that we examine in our paper. It is an extremely rare kind of research in software engineering.

For interest’s sake, let’s drill down some more…

Of the organisations that have tried to adopt CMMI, some will have succeeded in rolling it out, and some will have failed.

Of those who succeeded in adopting CMMI, some organisations will have got some benefit, while others will have had no benefit.

Where do you think most CMMI/SPI research sits?

Most research papers report on how organisations benefitted from using CMMI. In the literature, you almost never hear about organisations who tried and failed to adopt CMMI, nor about organisations who adopted but then failed to benefit from CMMI. (This effect is called selection bias, or publication bias, depending on how it arises.) It’s sort of understandable - companies don’t want to let themselves be seen in a bad light, and researchers may think that success is more glamorous than failure.

Looking at successful cases is necessary, but to really broaden the impact of software engineering research, we need to learn from failures as well!

However, I see a couple of people are implying that because F# is functional language, it’s not an OO language. Wrong! It’s both.

Somasegar says F# will be appealing to developers in the domains of “financial, scientific and technical computing.” He says that’s because of the correspondence you can achieve between F# and the mathematics that those developers work with in their domains. I say, also because of the speedy execution performance you can get from F#. Strong static typing in F# gives the compiler many more opportunities to be much smarter about optimization. Speed matters when you’re working with massive data sets and data streams. Dynamic languages will always struggle in comparison.

F# also has great potential as a teaching language in Universities, and Somasegar says that’s a target. So, I really hope Microsoft puts out a free Visual Studio Express edition for F# to make sure the barriers to getting started with F# on Windows are as low as they can be. F# can also run on mono on *nix, so really there’s no excuse to not give it a try whatever platform your University uses.

F# is particularly nice move for Microsoft as a company, because it’s such a strong story of home-grown innovation. I’d agree with Somasegar’s opinion that “[F#] is one of the best things that has happened at Microsoft ever since we created Microsoft Research over 15 years ago.”

p.s. Does anyone know how to search for “f#” on google news without finding faux-swear words? It’s f#@&!ng annoying.

Next week I’m off to Europe for a couple of weeks, presenting a paper at ME and another at NFP-SLA. I thought I should get some beer on so it can ferment while I’m away. (Exploit the parallelism inherent in the system!)

The Spicy Ghost was particularly nice, and my plan was to repeat that, but this time also adding some coriander seeds and orange rind to the wort, to approximate Hoegaarden blanche. Sadly they were out of Spicy Ghost at the shops, so instead I’ve used another Cascade Premium kit, this time the Pale Ale. I don’t know if the result will be anything like what I was originally hoping for, but I’m sure it’ll be quite drinkable.

I’ve been working in a team using the Confluence wiki to organise some information. Confluence is a page-based wiki, but I’ve been pushing it a little in the direction of being a semantic wiki, by using 2-column tables on some pages, to represent key-value pairs for page attributes and relationships. My problem was that, to Confluence, those tables were just ordinary textual content. There was no way to check that the special tables were well-formed, and there was no way to query the wiki using the page attributes and relationships.

My first plan was to export the wiki to XML and query that, but then I discovered that Confluence has a SOAP API. It looked promising, and it also looked like a good excuse to do some more scripting with F#.

I bumbled around the web looking for simple guide on how to actually use SOAP, and finally came across a page from Robert Pickering’s site that laid it all out for me. For Confluence, it goes like this:

1. Generate a C# file from the Confluence WSDL file:
   wsdl http://<your-confluence-path-here>/rpc/soap-axis/confluenceservice-v1?wsdl
2. Compile it to produce a dll:
   csc /target:library ConfluenceSoapServiceService.cs

(My wsdl.exe is in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin, and my csc.exe is in C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727, but yours might be somewhere else.)

Then you’re set to go. For the purposes of exposition, say you want a page called “PAGE” from a Confluence space called “SPACE”, to which you’ve got anonymous access:

1. In the F# interactive environment, load the dll, e.g. :
   #r “ConfluenceSoapServiceService.dll”
2. Then, create a new type F# object to expose that SOAP API:
   let wiki = new ConfluenceSoapServiceService()
   (Right now, in the interactive environment, I need to call this twice to get it to work, because of some strange F# interactive bug, but Don assures me it works first time when it’s compiled.)
3. The API functions are available as members of that new object, just like they were written natively in F#:
   let page = wiki.getPage(”", “SPACE”, “PAGE”)
4. But it’s not just the API functions - the values too are all just like they were written natively in F#. For example, the page returned above is in the RemotePage type. It has fields for things such as the page content:
   page.content

After that I was away - the standard libraries and seamless .net interoperability provided by F# made most things easy. The hardest part of the exercise was working out how to parse the Confluence wikicode using regexes. (Oh, the pain!)

So, now I’ve seen the light - web services really are ace. I was accessing an API implemented in Java, running on *nix, but to me it looked like it was native to F#, running on Windows. And setting it up took almost no effort. (After I found out how it was done. )

I think my epiphany was mostly about web services, or was it about F#?

I first started using Linux at home in the mid/late 90s, installing Redhat Linux 4 on a second-hand PC. I faithfully followed the Redhat releases, installing Redhat 6 on a new PC, and eventually upgrading to Redhat 9. Then, Redhat went all “enterprise”, and stopped their free package update management service. My old Redhat 9 box slowly became impossible to maintain. Maybe Redhat thought focussing on the enterprise was good for them - and maybe it did help their stock price for a while. At the time there was no credible transition (e.g. to Fedora), and so as a home user I just felt abandoned. Now I think Redhat’s getting what’s coming to them.

To successfully install Redhat 4, I had to host a private “installation party”, and buy pizzas for the Linux geeks who came around to mess around with OS configuration files on the command line. For a while I thought my Feisty beta installation experience was going to be similar. The desktop install stopped half-way through (ubiquity crashed), and then the alternate install managed to corrupt my software RAID configuration before failing. But finally the alternate installation worked without software RAID. Afterwards I was left in 800×600 screen resolution for a while, until I discovered some advice on the net about using dpkg-reconfigure.

There are still dome problems remaining now I’ve finished the installation. My box won’t poweroff when I shutdown. And, it’s still hard for Windows and Linux boxes to play nicely together on my network. I can share files in one direction but not the other, and it hasn’t “just worked” setting up my Linux box as a network print server for its local printer.

But, these are minor problems that don’t diminish my renewed Linux happiness. The desktop menus are clean, the system administration tools work (apart from the problems noted above), the package update management is fantastic, I like the use of sudo for root-less security, and it’s very neat to be asked to install system features only if/when you need them. Now we’ve upgraded, our scanner finally works, and we’ve been able to install Wesnoth to keep Liam occupied these school holidays.