So we’re onto my current project which involves working for a client based in Oslo, Norway which is pretty interesting. Almost a year ago I had an e-mail with flight details for the following week saying I was to get the 7am flight out of Heathrow to Oslo. This was for a three-day session to gather information about what would be required to install a Change Management system in the new project.

Tuesday came around and I caught a taxi at 5am to get to Heathrow. On arriving at Oslo airport I navigated the train system into the City and got a taxi to a building on a road I couldn’t pronounce. Once there I was greeted by my English manager and my team for the next year and beyond. Everyone was very friendly, took me to lunch and broke me into the Norwegian way of work.

A bit of history into this role and the reason for flying to Norway is that I am in a group called Development Control Services. During my placement and the role I took up on rejoining Accenture, I was working with a group of people interested in the backbone support for development projects; looking after the infrastructure and the management of the code that is developed and the environments code is deployed to for testing.

It is all about supporting developers rather than coding the programs which doesn’t initially sound so appealing if you want to be a coder. Within the DCS there are a lot more opportunities and much more variation in daily tasks. You can get to grips with the entire project lifecycle and our ultimate aim is to bring in standard practises for managing and setting up development projects as quickly and simply as possible. In the past year alone people based in the UK within the DCS have gone to Belgium, Norway, South Africa, America and Australia. Can’t really complain about that now! We provide the software, hardware and processes to control what is built and ensure we aren’t just randomly piecing code together to create a program. The aim is to always know what is included in a build of a program and why those changes were put in, without having to ask a million different people. Automating as many tasks involved in build, deployment, administration and environment setup as possible to improve turnaround adds a great deal of value to projects.

This is where the fun comes in and you find yourself developing tools for use across multiple projects due to the standards we are putting in place for code and environment management. For me this mainly involves the setting up and administration of the Rational toolset, predominantly Clear Case and Clear Quest. These provide a central repository for the code to be stored in, recording and providing history for files, changes made and who did them and when, along side a tool to monitor what changes are required and errors there are within the program being developed.

This first trip to Norway was to gather information about what the project wanted to get out of working with the UKDC DCS group and to start preparation for the setup of the tools. Installation began in January after I rolled off my current project and began working for Norway…