REI Whitepapers & Links

Whitepapers and other links produced by the staff of Release Engineering:

• Software Manufacturing: Leveraging Release Management
  A pdf copy of the presentation that founder and CTO Sandy Currier gave at the 25 March 2003 Boston Metro Rational ClearCase User's Group (BMRCCUG) meeting.
  A Perforce/ClearQuest version of the above presentation is available here.
• Software Manufacturing FAQ
  The Software Manufacturing FAQ by Release Engineering.
• SCM and Release Engineering: A Consultant's Hard-earned Methodology Revealed
  A whitepaper given at the 2001 Perforce User's Group Conference.  Describes some general approaches to successfully implementing a Parallel Software Development Environment.  Introduces StreamTree graphs and release engineering workflow graphs. 
• CCCQ
  The open source ReleasePro/ClearCase/ClearQuest integration project.
• P4CQ
  The open source ReleasePro/Perforce/ClearQuest integration project.
• P5 LAYER
  The open source Private Developer Branch add-on for Perforce (a shockwave file is available upon request - d3/PrivateDevBranches.swf).

General SCM links and other entry points:

• Brad Appleton's original Streamed Lines: Branching Patterns for Parallel Software Development - and the more current SCM Patterns website
• A couple interesting entires in Brad Appleton's blog
  Agile SCM Principles
  Codeline Flow, Availability and Throughput with references to Takt time, Process and Transfer batch sizes, MTTR/MTBF (Mean Time To Repair/Mean Time Between Failure of a codeline tip), etc.
• www.cmcrossroads.com - the CM CrossRoads website.  A good take off point for general CM related info, products, jobs, etc.
• Some good SCM Vendors: Accurev, ClearCase, MKS Source Integrity, and Perforce, . 

The art of agile, thinking, and problem solving:

• Throughput Accounting principles by Eliyahu M. Goldratt (wikipedia)
• Dialectic Enquiry methods (wikipedia)
• Thinking Processes Tools by the folks at mst-usa(TM)
• More wikipedia references on emotional intelligence
• The Agile Declaration of Interdependence and the Agile Manifesto
• Taiichi Ohno's 7 deadly sins of waste plus Jeffrey Liker's 8th waste:
  1. Overproduction
  2. Waiting (time on hand)
  3. Unnecessary transport or conveynace
  4. Overprocessing or incorrect processing
  5. Excess inventory (Note: I personally include excess investment here)
  6. Unnecessary movement (staff movement)
  7. Defects
  8. Unused employee creativity

Productivity/Quality Books: ("Productivity and Quality are effectively the same thing" - Peter Drucker)

• Software Configuration Management Patterns - the SCM Pattern's reference book
• The Toyota Way (amazon) - probably the book to read
• Lean Software Development and Implementing Lean Software Development by Mary and Tom Poppendieck
• Deming and Goldratt (amazon) - currently unreviewed but looks promising...

Real surfing links:

• The Point of Take Off - global surfing
• A New England based Point of Take Off - local surfing
• A secret surfing spot - somewhere on the east coast

Other eclectic links:

• Cool origami: robert j. lang
• Side-walk paintings by Julian Beever
• Innovative website designs: CrankBrother's inspiration page
• Interesting numbers (Fibonacci - wikipedia)
• An interesting quote of the day:  "Epiphany is now"