Ravenbrook Papers

Product Quality through Change Management

Richard Brooksby, 1999-06-20

Software development is all about increasing the value of our products to customers. This paper presents a method of planning, tracking, and managing change to a product, and of directing change at increasing that value. It describes evolutionary planning and delivery using a Perforce-based information system. The paper is based on the author's experience of introducing Capability Maturity Model level 2 and 3 key process areas in small (less than 20 engineer) software organizations.

Can we ship yet?

Gareth Rees, 2001-09-01

This paper explains how to use the Perforce software configuration management software [Perforce] to efficiently measure the quality of a product in a software development environment where there are many branches, customers, and product versions.

This paper describes the use of standard toolkits for accessing ODBC databases from Common Lisp. It was presented as a tutorial at the International Lisp Conference held in San Fransisco in October 2002.

Requirements and Change

Richard Brooksby, 2003-02-24

Software development is all about increasing the value of our products to customers. The more direct the connection between customer requirements and the changes made by software engineers, the more likely that those changes will improve the product and increase its value for the customers, and therefore the organization. I describe a simple model of requirements engineering and a method of managing change to software which focusses directly on those requirements.

This paper is based on Product Quality through Change Management, but with more focus on requirements and their relationship to change. It was written for presentation at the British Computer Society Configuration Management Specialist Group conference "Implementing CM Everywhere: Change, Configuration and Content Management", held 2003-07-24/25 at Homerton College, Cambridge, UK.

Changing how you Change

Richard Brooksby, 2003-03-06

It's an interesting exercise to examine a company's configuration management needs and set up a system, but this paper discusses what happens a few years after that. Systems evolve to adapt to organisation change and customer requirements. How do you make sure that these changes are good ones and what do you do if you realise that things are going wrong? This paper is a case study of just such a situation, showing how it came about, what we are planning to do about it and how similar situations might be prevented in other organizations.

This paper was written for presentation at the Perforce User Conference 2003, held 2003-05-08/09 at the Paris Hotel, Las Vegas, USA, and for presentation at the British Computer Society Configuration Management Specialist Group conference "Implementing CM Everywhere: Change, Configuration and Content Management", held 2003-07-24/25 at Homerton College, Cambridge, UK.