1. Managing Software in Higher Education
James Lambert
Ian Rifkin
Brandeis University
#NC11_SESS36

2. Who We Are Software Systems Administrator Enterprise Architect
Your role?
Why are you here?

3. Release Management What is release management?
Managing change by understanding what software is on your server(s).

4. How?
How to accomplish goals of release management?

5. Applications at Brandeis
apx. 7 million lines of code
Many are created in-house
Some open source products
Some proprietary products

6. Our Starting Point
Software management practices apx. 4 years needed improvement
Long, unmanageable application files
Mixing of code, design, user information, IPs, etc all hard-coded in long files
Limited usage of any version control (some CVS, some RCS)
Code was often edited on the fly
3rd party software problems too (dependencies, upgrades)

7. Environments Sandbox: Individual developer’s area to create/edit
Development: Unit testing
Test: Integration testing
Production: It’s live!

8. Environment Builds What should you do with underlying software?
Apache, Java, libraries, class files, etc

9. Versioning Software Files
Version control software
Version
Control
Sandbox
Commit Changes
Get Updates

10. Versioning Software Files
We use Subversion (svn)
Directory structure of repositories:
Trunk, releases, branches
Directory structure within applications:
.control (encrypted password files)
bin (cron scripts)
conf (configuration files)
perllib (custom application code)
templates (HTML templates)
website (images, CSS, JavaScript)

11. Software Kits/Builds Builds/kits
Our builds take files from svn (trunk or a branch), groups them together with a version number, enabling them to be released.
Build
Server
Version
Control
System
Get files
Group files
Software
Kit

12. Release Scripts What should happen when you release a software build?
Kit
Send software kit, unpack and prep for application use
Application
Server

13. Releases Practices Set standards
Don’t “release and run” (esp. to production)
Consider downtime implications
Major versus minor release?
What constitutes a critical (urgent) release and what should that mean?
Who tests?
Where are bugs recorded?

14. Communication Communication between developers is critical
Esp. when working together on a single product

15. Communication
Don’t rely on version control for all of your communication
Branches of code are needed at times, but add complications that need to be communicated

16. Questions? Ian Rifkin: irifkin@brandeis.edu
James Lambert: