Distinguish change requests from change packages
"What to do" is different from "what was done". For example, a bug report is a "what to do" entity, and a bug fix is a "what was done" entity. Your SCM process should distinguish between the two.

Give everything an owner
Every process, policy, document, work product, component, code line, branch, and task in your SCM system should have an owner. Owners represent entities by nurturing them into growth and maturity throughout their lifecycle.

Use living documents
Describe your policies and procedures using living documents; that is, your process documentation should be as readily available and as subject to update as your managed source code.

Documents are useless if they're inaccessible or unable to be updated. If possible, you should be able to access your process documents from all of your development environments: at your own workstation, at someone else's workstation, and from your machine at home. Updates should be made easily and made immediately available.

Next week, we'll talk about some SCM practices that really work. Stay tuned.

For more than 20 years, David Gewirtz, the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone? and The Flexible Enterprise, has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com.