In many ways, software configuration management (SCM) is very similar to a plumbing system. It was probably there when you bought your house, or joined your company. It becomes out-dated and inefficient, and can end up costing a lot more just to maintain than replace. How often do people realistically think about replacing their plumbing, or their SCM tool for that matter? Sure, the transition often requires upfront costs and a temporary lag in progress while a new tool is implemented and teams come up to speed. But what are the potential benefits of reevaluating your toolset, and can those potential benefits outweigh the costs of disturbing the status quo?
Elimination of Merge Hell
Teams often struggle with merges for a release, and end up in “merge
hell” . In some cases, the pain is so bad that software doesn’t even get
released, or teams have to spend weeks cleaning up a branch. If this
was the plumbing system in your house, it could be the equivalent of
having a shower that only has ice cold water. This is a problem that
we couldn’t tolerate at home, yet because it is accepted part of our day
to day “SCM” lives, we tolerate it. Would you take an ice cold shower
every day or would you do something about it?
SCM Performance Improvements
Many SCM systems suffer from performance issues. This could be due to the size of the repository or the performance of the network. A huge benefit of changing to a new system is performance improvements – is there a faster tool out there? The productivity gain alone when going from 15 minute check-ins to 30 seconds saves your development team hours. If this was your house, would you tolerate a sink that dribbled water out when you turned the faucet?SCM tools are highly engrained in day-to-day software development activities. As a result, many processes, regardless of their inefficiency or difficulty, become routine. When these processes become routine, it is often difficult to realize how impeding they are, or how much these processes can be improved. Many teams are starting to investigate the benefits of “ripping out the plumbing,” by looking for tools that will help them improve software development processes.
Processes such as branching and merging, and even accelerating development as a whole are increasingly important to dev teams, but are proven difficult to establish without the proper tools. So, while replacing your software configuration management tool may seem like an overwhelming task, the potential value that teams can gain from evaluating their tools for can have a dramatic effect on productivity. With the speed and capability of today’s tools, it seems worthwhile to take a step back and see how these new solutions might fit in with your development process and help you optimize the efficiency of your development team.
The Changing Landscape of SCM
http://accurev.com/blog/tag/software-configuration-management/It’s 1998. I’m just starting my job at Rational Software, supporting
ClearCase. During my training and through my first few months handling
customer issues, I developed a deep understanding of the complexities of
SCM and the heavy-handed centralized control that ClearCase provided
its customer base. Wrappers, triggers and script automation were the key
to a tightly controlled, centralized development environment. In the
developers’ eyes, dealing with the version control tool was just a part
of doing their job.
Developers like to code, not “waste time” with tools or
infrastructure. They are creators and want to create their masterpiece.
Check-in, Check-out, Merge, etc. are not ways developers want to spend
their time, especially if they are forced to deal with poor performance
from an SCM tool, whether it’s by the tool itself, or the myriad of
wrappers that were forced on top of the SCM tool their company chose. In a developers eyes, any time spent NOT writing code is wasted time.However, despite the negative ramifications of SCM centralization and control to the developer’s productivity, there are absolute benefits to the enterprise that cannot be lost. Security, traceability, visibility and control are paramount to running a development organization.
My decision to come work at AccuRev in 2001 was based on the software’s unique ability to provide all the features the enterprise needs, while minimizing the negative impact SCM has on developer productivity. The ease at which AccuRev provides visualization and control over the entire development process was truly a game changer. And while still a centralized SCM tool, AccuRev was designed to minimize the pain developers felt during their day to day operations.
It’s now 2012 and the SCM landscape has changed dramatically for developers. De-centralized / Distributed development is all the rage now. Version control tools such as Git and Mercurial are providing developers with the experience they demand. Local copies of repositories give unparalleled performance. Strong branching models provide near painless branching and merging. Tools like Git are designed with the developer in mind. Performance, merging strength and extremely in-depth control of all operations are the focus of product features.
All that said, while distributed SCM tools are great for developers and fine for open source development, Enterprises are experiencing chaotic development and losing control in their engineering organizations. So which way do you go? Centralized appeases the Enterprise, De-Centralized appeases the developers.
The answer is both. Now that AccuRev has introduced Kando, Enterprises can maintain all the security, traceability, audit-ability, visibility and process control their business depends on, while giving their developers exactly what they want – to use Git for their day to day development.
General Availability for Industry’s First Seamless Integration of Enterprise-Level Security and Visualization into Git
AccuRev released for general availability today the first Git integration that seamlessly bridges the world of commercial tools and open source software configuration management.
AccuRev’s Kando, an enterprise security and compliance platform for Git, which was released in beta in January, complements the open source SCM tool with additional functionality, allowing organizations using Git to simultaneously leverage enterprise-level security and requirements traceability.
Kando is the first software development solution that enables Git development shops to add workflow, issue tracking, security, change requirements and other capabilities to the software development process, all while maintaining the flexibility and familiarity of Git environments.
Kando’s ground-breaking enterprise-level security and compliance capabilities allow its users to:
- Comply with enterprise-level regulations, by providing full audit and traceability
- Secure Git with access control capabilities, and support for enterprise authentication via LDAP and Microsoft Active Directory
- Visualize and manage development processes that use Git in AccuRev’s StreamBrowser™ environment
- Support Software Change and Configuration Management (SCCM) through change-based development with AccuRev Change Packages
“Our Kando Beta announcement
in January had an overwhelmingly positive response, and it is clear that
Git adoption has expanded well beyond the Linux community, into product
development and IT,” said Lorne Cooper, AccuRev’s CEO. “Kando can solve
many security and requirements traceability problems that enterprise
organizations face when adopting Git, and really allows Git an
opportunity to scale the development process across enterprise software
development teams.”
During the development of Kando, AccuRev established the Kando Technical Advisory Board, comprised of representatives from several enterprise organizations with Git environments.
