Department Spotlight: SCM

This little department has a super-sized workload. With only three employees, some people might think that the admittedly small Software Configuration Management (SCM) department has a teenie weenie workload. "We get that a lot, actually," said a tired-looking Deborah Eskenazi. "But after so many days of working until midnight, we don't have the strength to correct people." Deborah, the SCM Manager, sums up what most Ultramain employees already know: The work never stops in SCM. But exactly what is it that SCM does? To find out, follow us on a software configuration journey you won't soon forget. Keeping the "Whatchamacallems" separate from each other Software development in general requires different "environments," or self-contained workspaces for the code, so that different tasks can be performed on the same version of the application. Internally, Ultramain maintains four different software environments for every "stream," or version of the ULTRAMAIN. For a release like ULTRAMAIN 81F, SCM creates and maintains environments for development, quality control, customer release, and install. Every stream has these four environments. But, if you're like us, all of the SCM environment and stream technobabble just sounds like gobbledygook after a while. So we decided to interview somebody in SCM to find out what all this actually means. Julia Montoya, an SCM Analyst who earned the affectionate nickname "The Hammer" after coming down hard on coworkers who tried to slip less-than-perfect materials into an ULTRAMAIN v8 patch, said that it takes a certain type of person to maintain all of the environments. "Look," she said. "Just think about the v8 patching environments. We're not even talking about the v9 or training environments here. You have 13 separate streams, right? So at 4 environments per stream, we have 52 environments to maintain. Holy cow! That is a lot! I've never thought about it that way!"  Who's Your Patch Daddy? SCM's primary responsibility is delivering software to customers. Every Ultramain software patch and release is carefully prepared and packaged by SCM. The process starts with a list of Service Requests (SRs) slated for inclusion in the patch. SCM Analysts then perform database restructures and compile all of the new changes into a patch. Then, after they post the patch on the Ultramain Customer Support Center website, they email customers with a link to the download. Andrew Calvin, the only SCM Analyst who wears his hair in a ponytail and occasionally smokes a pipe, had this to say about the ULTRAMAIN patching process: "Dude, I live for the [database] restructures. You know, I really shouldn't tell you this, but sometimes the database scripts are like 12 pages long. And that's for one restructure, dude. Far out, huh? When I see those 12-pagers coming, I put on my headphones, turn up the Metallica, and pop the top of a Red Bull or two." Take a stroll down Ultramain's memory lane Another SCM duty involves keeping each and every ULTRAMAIN software release safety stashed away. SCM's archives contain everything dating back to Ultramain's early years. Releases and patches, and everything else, all the way down to databases, can be found in the archives. You name it, and it's probably in there. If for some reason you wanted to install and run, say, ULTRAMAIN version 6 on your computer, SCM would be the department to talk to. As you can imagine, it's no easy task maintaining archives for a software company that has been in business for more than twenty years! SCM Analyst Andrew Calvin likes to think of himself as the software archive gatekeeper. However, when asked to identify the hardest part of archiving job, Andrew hesitated. "Well, ummm... Hmmm. I'm not sure." That alone speaks volumes about a task that most of us would consider, well, daunting.