We ran across the article “Overcoming Resistance to Change by SCM” by Ben Weatherall on CMCrossroads. The excerpts below exemplify the need for tools like AccuRev that support changing processes and Agile adoption. Ben Weatherall has kindly allowed us to re-post these excerpts so that we may share his insight with all our readers.

Excerpts from “Overcoming Resistance to Change by SCM”

By Ben Weatherall

“As an industry, SCM is conservative – we hold the corporate jewels in our hands and we are reluctant to let either processes, procedures or personnel have a chance to mess them up. In fact, when they do get messed up we tend to lose our jobs. Then along came Agile and the need to support it while maintaining both technical and professional integrity.”

“Some of the old versioning tools could not handle merges of codebases where one or more of them had been refactored, so many of us had to rapidly switch tools. This often required a lot of hidden work to get triggers, wrappers, interfaces, metrics data collection, etc. working with the new tools. At the same time, there was a push to use tools that supported such things as backlogs and user stories instead of “just” defects. It was often the case where a development organization would bring in their own tools and tell SCM to either use them or get out of the way.”

“All of a sudden SCMers had to start rolling out their own tools, integrations, customizations, etc. with a speed even greater than the typical Agile development organization. And with significantly less personnel. We now leveraged what we could of the Agile methodology. We did rapid prototyping knowing ahead of time that things would have to be completely redone at a future time. Our assumptions, ones that made sense at the time, was that once a branching/stream structure and new tracking tools were in place to support this new way of developing software, it would stabilize and we could catch up.”

“The end result of this is that SCM has to adapt and do so at a rate that would have been considered impossible just a few years ago. We must adapt technologically, but we have to maintain the core integrity of principals of SCM: identification, reproducibility and traceability. A typical development sprint team consists of 5 people of which at least one represents the Quality organization. A typical SCM “team” consists of only one person. Across the software development industry as a whole, the SCM headcount is probably only 1-2% of the combined Development and Quality “workers.” For those of you in larger companies or those who are involved in admin-heavy tools, this probably sounds low; but from empirical evidence it is not. This is especially troubling for those who have to support multiple teams who are using different methodologies or variants of them.”

Ben Weatherall is currently based in Fort Worth, Texas where he practices Practical CM on a daily basis supporting a modified Agile-SCRUM development methodology. He uses a combination of AccuRev, CVS, Bugzilla and AnthillPro (as well as custom tools). He is a member of IEEE, ASEE (Association of Software Engineering Excellence – The SEI’s Dallas based SPIN Affiliate), FWLUG (Fort Worth Linux Users Group), NTLUG (North Texas Linux Users Group) and PLUG (Phoenix Linux Users Group).

For the entire version of this article on CM Crossroads, please visit: http://www.cmcrossroads.com/cm-journal-articles/13047