Hi guys,

I am working on build and release from past 1.5 years (70%) on installshield cruisecontrol,maven,finalbuilder,hudson on windows platform.

Apart form these i am working on .net (bug fixing).

I am in a confusion whether to change my designation to build and release engineer or software engineer.

How will be growth in build and release ?

Venkatesh,

As you have .net and also installshield, i suggest you choose to be a software engineer.

One who develops software would become core part of any organization. SCM / Release engineer is always considered as "support"

While deciding, consider your passion towards what you choose.

Sanjeev

Hi Sanjeev,

I am disagree with you on this. This is completely depends on How the organization and team structure has been setup and how big team is? based on my experience, if team is big and then you might need people for specific role such as build engineer, release engineer, scm engineer and application packaging guy.

if team is small, one guy have to take full ownership of all these activity. but all above scenario gets applied with services based company where each project is setup as a individual account. so in this case SCM engineer, build and release engineer would be a part of core development group not as a support guy.

but in a product development company, where they have centralized version system and build infrastructure / release process, you might need to perform as a support for dev team but you will be having your team(sets of people) with whom you will have sharing (configuration, build, release and packaging).

End of the day, everybody is acting as a support for their clients.

I see good future growth in build and release and definitely its a niche area at present. if you are having some quality skills then your career growth would be far better than any developer. make sure you are expertise in Perl or Python or php / Bash / one open source SCM tools( Git or SVN), Any one build tools such as hudson, CC, n all and any one packaging tools. installshield is best for you.

Hi Rajesh,

I accept your comments. May be true if you are a fresh graduate and you have been placed / chosen this stream. But if you are from development background. Its different.

Yes, everyone working for clients, supporting clients. But SCM is again support to support team :).

Regards,
Sanjeev

Buddy,

This time i will have to agree with you. :)

Well i started from development background and then moved to SCM.

Well I am still unable to find satisfied answer for SCM growth after 10 yrs of working in SCM field. May be IT manager, Infra mgr, or you may be consulting ;)