Master Only in Production (an Improvement)

  Published on July 5, 2017 ·  3 min read ·   Author: Donald L. Schulz

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about My New 3 Rules for Releases and one of those rules was to only release into production code that was built from the master branch. In that solution I wrote a PowerShell script that would run first thing on the deployment to only go forward if the branch from the build came from master otherwise it would fail the deployment. This gave me a guarantee that builds that did not come from master would never get deployed into Production....

One Build Definition to Support Multiple Branches

  Published on June 1, 2017 ·  4 min read ·   Author: Donald L. Schulz

Before I moved to git, I had the same situation that many of you have had when it comes to managing build definitions. I had a build definition for each branch and for a single product this could have been several all doing the same thing. Yea, sure they were clones of each other and all I really needed to do was to change the path to the source in each case....

Sending an Email to the Developer when the Build Failed

  Published on May 4, 2017 ·  4 min read ·   Author: Donald L. Schulz

Over the many versions of TFS there were existing workarounds that allowed us to send an email to the developer that queued the build and it had failed. Although these workarounds did work, I always felt that this should have been handled by the alert system within TFS. What was lacking was some sort of condition that if the build failed it should go to the developer that queued it up....

When is Waterfall a Good Choice

  Published on April 19, 2017 ·  7 min read ·   Author: Donald L. Schulz

In my work as an ALM consultant I will often be asked the question or told that a team can’t go and practice agile they have to do waterfall. I think they are looking at this in the wrong way. One of the things to think about in waterfall versus agile is what these two methodologies are really all about. Is waterfall really all that bad? The answer to that question is: No, waterfall is actually a great methodology and a great pattern that has worked for some projects....

An Argument against the Date Based Version Number

  Published on February 22, 2017 ·  5 min read ·   Author: Donald L. Schulz

In the past I have followed two types of version numbers for the products that I build and support on the side. Products that were customer facing all followed the Semantic concept of version control. If there was a big change but not breaking then the minor number incremented. If the change could have potential breaking changes then the Major number was incremented. This concept works well in that every time that code was changed the third digit, the build number was incremented....