Assumptions Made on the Background of People Reading This Book

This book assumes that the reader has some experience working on or with a software development team either at a company or in an academic institution. This is not a high-level 35,000-foot view of SCM. Plenty of books out there already take that approach. I am taking a more granular approach as to how to do it rather than just telling you what you need to do.

Although some examples in this book concern Microsoft tools and technologies, I have tried to write this book in a tool-agnostic way. In other words, regardless of the tools or platforms that you develop on, you will still be able to use these processes to ship your software effectively. By "ship your software," I mean any way that software can be delivered to your customers, whether via the Internet, disc media, internal server releases, Web services and applications, or out of the box.