I agree with your comment that developers do not care much about compliance. But there is some overlapping needs between developers and compliance – mainly what went into the build. Developers and management alike want to know if the source code they are managing matches the executables running in production. Also, what versions of 3rd party libraries such as SOA were used in the build. This is in essence compliance. And you can’t get that kind dependency listing from simply doing a check-out prior to the build or interrogating the build directory for files and calling it a bill of material. This requires really managing the compile process itself and watching what the compiler/linker is using and where it came from. And as you know, this is normally defined by the script itself – not what was checked out of the SCM tool or located in the build directory.

So then we get to the 800lb guerilla in the room – the issue with ad hoc scripting. It is the scripts themselves that are doing the build not the ALM scheduling tools that called the script. Which then takes me to products like Maven. Maven provides a higher level of reusablity, minimizing build breaks then a simple Ant/XML script. After 12 years of providing reuse within the build process, and minimizing ad hoc scripting, we Openmake people are excited to see developers beginning to understand that reuse within the build process is the first step towards improving the build system. True dependency management, reuse, and compile management ultimately leads to more efficient builds (incremental builds for example), less broken builds and a truly agile development proocess that meets the compliance levels required by management.