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Electric Cloud, a leading provider of software production management tools, has always employed an iterative, agile approach to its software development. But like many fast-paced technology companies, a script-driven, manual approach and once-daily integration builds could not scale effectively to support its growth. Through a mix of tools and best practices, Electric Cloud was able to deploy an end-to-end build and change management system with fully automated continuous integration (CI). This new software production system has reduced the time Electric Cloud engineers spend on software production by more than 30 percent and has saved the company an estimated $700,000 per year.

Traditionally, managing distributed teams has been perceived as difficult. But the advent of effective modern processes and tools is breaking through the obstacles and making distributed teams a viable—and valuable—option. Find out how to make the most of people, processes, and tools to create and maintain a successful distributed team.

Evolution of a word's meaning through common misuse is a reality of human communication. In the software industry, by using the phrase quality assurance to refer to what is more properly called quality control (i.e., testing), we may have lost our ability to answer the question "does our process work?"

While some debate which, if any, industry practices deserve the designation "best practices," this tongue-in-cheek look at the horrors of some of software's "worst practices" drives home the value of the good ones and may help us improve the quality of our software.

Software development has always been an exercise in managing complexity because there appears to be no end to the problems to which we can apply automatic computation. It has progressed as a discipline as good minds have created abstractions that transform that complexity into simplicity.

Do you manage a team or a group? How can you tell the difference, and is it important to differentiate the two? In this column, Esther Derby explains that identifying your associates as one or the other is paramount to how they should be managed.

Traditional program management offices (PMOs) are responsible for providing checks and balances to the development and IT organizations regarding budget and schedule. Oversight and management that comes from the PMO drives certain behaviors in the project managers and, therefore, in the project staff. Similarly, the Agile PMO provides certain checks and balance, but principally focuses on the holistic well-being of the project.