Interested in Agile methods?

Do you want to get the best out of your team? Yes, some agile methodologies combined with well-known best practices can be the answer.
Agile is all about people, and about people who really know how to get their jobs done. But there's also something to keep in mind which sits down on the core of the business: agile best practices are all about being able to adapt to change, and this has a lot to do with economics.
Look at the image above. The graphic on the left was introduced by Barry Boehm back on 1981. It has been on of the most influential mind settings for software developers on the last decades. It really created an upfront way of thinking, making a lot of developers grow up thinking requirements must be frozen.
On November 2007 in a meeting celebrating Peopleware's 20th anniversary (the article was published on IEEE Software), a group of inspiring software gurus, including Boehm, admited that the "evil curve" is not anymore true for teams using the right methods and best practices.
Beck draw the graphic on the right on 2002. If you implement the right best practices, you'll keep your software ready to change, and it really has a deep impact on company's economics.
Let's see how SCM can help here.

Are you familiar with any agile method? We usually recommend SCRUM, but there are also many other agile methodolgies available.
SCRUM is focused on project management and control, and it really helps increasing visibility, something which was already highlighted by McConnell back on '96 (http://stevemcconnell.com/rd.htm).
The SCRUM cycle is really easy to describe: you have a product backlog (list of requirements), a meeting to decide what will be done on the next iteration, a period between 2 to 4 weeks to implement the features, and finally a meeting to demo the new software and then check what went right or wrong.

Check our article at DDJ about controlled & continuous integration

How Plastic helps?

First Plastic helps enabling your team to implement the branch per task pattern, which will enable true parallel development, high productivity ratios, better task isolation, and always working against a stable and well-known release. This helps solving the "shooting a moving target" problem that occurs when you implement "mainline development".
Plastic is very strong handling the whole branch and merge process, so you just focus on development and it will help merging changes back.
Plastic integrates with third party tools like OnTime, Jira, Bugzilla, VersionOne and Mantis. This systems are very importante to manage all the tasks on a sprint.

Remember this: whether they're bugfixes or new features it doesn't matter, handle them all with a bug and issue tracking tool and map them to Plastic.