Versioning and control

It is worth noting that behind the xProcess workbenches used by the managers, process engineers, planners and participants on the teams there is an innovative distributed architecture that ensures all the changes made are shared throughout the team. Whether changes were made originally when the team member was connected to the network or temporarily working off-line, xProcess handles storing and merging changes as they arrive at the server and each distributed client. I'm beginning to wonder whether this particular aspect of xProcess is in fact the most important from the point of view of effective team management, even though it is probably the least conspicuous of its virtues.

Since documents and other artifacts can be included for management within the xProcess environment, the underlying architectureallows all project data to be safely managed and distributed with minimum intrusion for team members who simply experience that processes, plans and artifacts they are using are kept continuously in-step with the rest of the team. Subsequent auditing of the project, should it be required is very straightforward since there is full access to complete change histories of project files. It is a vital but inconspicuous benefit of the xProcess system.

If you'd like to know more about this particular aspect of xProcess, I'm sharing a platform with Paul Kuzan, Ivis's chief architect for xProcess, at JavaOne in May. We'll be sharing more about this aspect and lessons learned from the implementation of the system.