Today was the final day of the 3rd BCS Configuration Management Group Conference.

My paper on Variant Management, co-written with Danilo Beuche of pure-systems, was accepted a few months ago and today was the point of delivery.

As noted previously there were a few sleepy heads around but I went easy on the audience (at least at the start).

I’ll put the paper up on the Software Acumen web site once I’m back in the office but the basic idea was that there are sub-optimal ways of managing variant development and there are optimal ways of managing variant development.

Sub-optimal methods including Clone-and-own, Independent Component Teams and Platform Versions. These can help in some cases - OK, maybe clone-and-own only ‘helps’ for a very short time - but each has their disadvantanges. One issue of course is that unlike Variant Management they don’t necessarily manage variants across the life cycle but are rather focussed on managing variation in the Configuration Management, Build and Release processes.

When presenting I prefer to have as much audience interaction as possible - it is easier for everyone - so I peppered the talk with questions to the audience and adapted the line of discussion to people’s experiences. We had a good discussion of how variant management helps address the problems of the other named approaches by allowing component dependencies to be formally captured and maintained and so helps developers minimize component interdependencies in a way that isn’t possible when dependencies are not visible or are only managed informally.

Anyway, I think the audience was largely sympathetic and I spoke to most of the people later in the day about the content.

Today was also busier in terms of people coming to the stand so this seemed like a worthwhile event - at least we were noticed and recognised by a few people - however, as always, the proof of the value of an event is in the customer contact that follows and (hopefully) an eventual implementation…

We’re at the 3rd BCS Configuration Management Group conference until later today.

Software Acumen are silver sponsors of the event this year and we’ve been talking about and demonstrating the pure::variants product we distribute on behalf of pure-systems GmBH.

At lunchtime yesterday Danilo Beuche of pure-systems gave a (very) short demo of pure::variants - the variant management tool we distribute in the UK and Ireland. 20 minutes is nowhere near enough time to do justice to the tool but I feel he did a good job of getting the essence of that it does across.

During the day we had a number of people come to the stand to talk about what we were up to and the nice thing was that some of them even have a variant management problem!

After the conference sessions Serena put on a free bar and this was enjoyed by all. Then the conference dinner took place. For once the vegetarian food was pretty good - I have had bad experiences at these things in the past. The company was also excellent.

After dinner we were ‘ambushed’ by Artists Incognito - in this case a trio of singers disguised as waitresses performed a medley of opera and ‘easy-listening’ songs as we finished our coffees.

Later it was announced that there was still cash ‘behind the bar’ and there was a general exodus to make use of this generous facility. I retired ‘relatively’ early but a few people were still going strong at 04:00 I’m told, consequently there were a few sleepy heads this morning. Ideal fodder for my talk on Variant Management…