A Process for Ensuring Integrity of Releases 
Joe Levens
Program Manager
Wolters Kluwer

Introduction:

In looking at problems found when making software releases to production or test bed systems, you may see that the root cause of many of them are related to basic errors in configuration management or poor control over change management. Though it may be thought that the great majority of errors found in production and advanced testing stages (UAT, beta, etc.) are attributed to human error in the coding phase and missed in the testing process, a surprising number of errors are introduced in:

• final configuration check-in, build and release processing
• functionality not approved for release and not easily realized is present

This paper discusses a practical way to help minimize errors that come about due to the above reasons. The process proposed can also be used to help satisfy the CMMI Level 2 Configuration Management Specific Goal about ensuring integrity of baselines, and can be used as a metric to help satisfy CMMI Measurement and Analysis criteria as well.

Learning Objectives:

Participants would be given enough information to implement this procedure and evaluate for themselves how valuable it would be. Benefits are anticipated to be higher quality software releases, as a result of finding problems with:

• final configuration check-in, build and release processing
• functionality not approved for release and not easily realized is present

Outline:

• Introduction and high level intent of the presentation
• Common errors in final configuration check-in, build, and release processing
• Functionality unintended for a release
• A method of protection against these situations
• Results experienced
• Conclusion

Biography:

Joseph Levens has worked in development, testing, configuration management, and process improvement roles for 24 years. He formed and led the Configuration Management group at Reuters for 8 years, which performed a unique process of integrity checking on software releases during this time, to significantly improve product quality delivered to the customer. His group managed an average of 1000 software and document releases per year, distributed globally. The process described in this paper, designed and implemented by him, was used to uncover a variety of inconsistencies in products intended to be installed on production systems and test beds. Joseph is currently a Program Manager for Wolters Kluwer, where he chairs a Software Process Improvement Collaboration Forum among organizations throughout North America .