When I got into the Compound Document Architecture (CDA) project, I was very impressed by a number of features of their process.

CDA was a component delivered as a part of several Digital operating systems and as a layered product on several other operating systems. It shipped on ten platforms in all. With all of those platforms, coordination could be difficult. To deal with that, the component used a "next boat out of harbor" strategy, mostly decoupling the component release schedule from the release schedule of the underlying operating systems. Releases would be delivered from the development branch to the release branch as they were sufficiently tested and the operating systems would pick the code up from there when they were ready to test and ship a new version.

The product had an automated nightly build that would run in sequence on all ten platforms, sending email with the results of the build on each platform to the entire team. The report that was mailed out would list all source control changes since the last successful build, so if the build broke it generally wasn't hard to figure out who broke it. This build could also be run as a local build against the user's checked out code with the results sent just to the user who requested it. Engineers who broke the build would get gently razzed for it and quickly learned to make sure all the builds ran against their updated code before checking it in.

For dealing with incoming bug reports, the team instituted a "Coroner of the Week" role. Each engineer would take a turn at this duty, which involved reading through the bugs as they came in, making sure the needed information was attached, reproducing it if possible, and doing the initial analysis to determine where it needed to be assigned in order to get resolved. It was a very useful discipline because it meant that everybody on the team had to have at least a passing familiarity with all of the code in the component.

All these practices worked so well that I have tried to reproduce them, when appropriate, to solve problems in projects I have worked on since then.