New home!

This blog has been moved to:

http://arul-jegadish.com/release/

All the old posts have been moved to the new home. I'll be publishing my new posts there.

The undocumented Perforce!

I was reading the book "Practical Perforce" by Laura Wingerd and was plesantly surprised when I read about the undocumented commands in Perforce!

Yes, there are a whole lot of undocumented commands that you can use to do lot of smart operations. But the drawback is some of them are deprecated and all of them are unsupported. So use them at your own risk.

The following command will tell you the full list of undoc commands:

p4 help undoc

Here are a few of the undoc stuff that I liked:

p4 files "//depot/...@=1234" -- will give you the list of files changed by 1234
p4 changes "//depot/...@>1234" -- Will list all the changelists done after 1234. The same syntax can be used with dates as well. The quotes around the filespec is needed.

Will try out some of these undoc stuff and document it here!

Perforce: Get quickly to your files in P4Win

If you use P4Win as the Perforce client, then here is one keyboard shortcut that you will love.

Copy a file path (depot path or client path) and paste it (ctrl + v) on the P4Win window and P4Win will take you directly to that file.


-- Copy the file path
-- Paste it (ctrl + v) on P4Win window
-- And navigate directly to that file

Attending Proto.in FE 2008

The stage is ready for the next edition of Proto.in (FE 2008), a premier event to showcase tech startups. The first edition for 2008 is on 18th and 19th Jan, 2008 in Chennai.

I got to attend the previous edition of Proto, which was how I got introduced to the world of tech startups in India.

This time around about 20 companies are expected to demo their work. As of this writing, both product nominations and participant registrations are open. Visit the Proto site for more details.

Where in your org structure is Release Management?

Found an interesting article that talks about this question. It's worth a read ...

Release Management - QA or engineering?

There seems to be some debate around where in an organization Release Management really belongs. Is release management a function of engineering, or is it a function of quality assurance or quality control? A case can be made for both, or neither.

Read More >>

In the place where I currently work, the release management team is a subset of the QA team. But in my previous organization, the organization is big and the product is complex enough that we had a separate release management team reporting to a separate VP that took care of release management of a set of products.

In any case, the release management team needs to be treated as a separate stake holder so as to ensure effective implementation of processes.