In May of 2005, the company I worked for, Polycom, decided to switch our Software Configuration Management tool from ClearCase to AccuRev. Initially, this decision was not taken well by the developers in my business unit since they had been using Base ClearCase for several years. However, after seeing how much easier AccuRev was to use and that it did everything that we needed for our development tasks, we became firm believers that AccuRev really is a “Best of breed” Configuration Management tool.
We evaluated a couple of CM tools before settling on AccuRev. Among the tools we looked at were IBM Rational ClearCase UCM (which I was very familiar with), CVS, and Accurev. CVS was being used by development teams in both offices and it was determined to be a tool that would not scale well for us. After evaluating ClearCase UCM and AccuRev, it was decided that AccuRev was the way to go, for several reasons. One reason Clearcase UCM did not do well was that we could not even get it to work at one of our offices that was using Linux for development (they were using 9 different types of Linux at the time). AccuRev positively shined during this part of the evaluation by the fact that it was very easy to setup and use in a Linux environment. Another reason and a huge advantage for AccuRev was the fact that it was very easy to use over a WAN between multiple sites (i.e., Austin TX and Andover, MA) without a mechanism like MultiSite. The AccuRev servers that the development team in Andover used were located in Austin, TX. For the 3 years that that I worked with our team using AccuRev, I never had any major issues using it over the network. A third big reason was that we also did not have to pay for ClearCase MultiSite licenses which meant a big cost savings for the company. This last reason was major factor in management choosing AccuRev over ClearCase UCM.
After selecting AccuRev as our new CM tool, we had to migrate the current source code that was in ClearCase. At the time that we were doing this, there was no migration tool to take source code in ClearCase and move it over to AccuRev. We decided to archive the existing ClearCase Version Object Bases (VOBs) and leave them as is on their current servers in the Andover, MA office. This was determined by our management team to be the best way to start off using AccuRev. Most of this legacy code was for really old products that had been “End of Lifed”. So, we were not really losing much by doing this. We then imported the latest code from the VOBs that we cared about. The import of this source code was just brought in as flat files. This worked out well for us and for those who wanted to keep legacy history around.
The training for using AccuRev was very short. AccuRev sent a trainer to our office in Andover and we had 2 groups of developers (about 15 each), attend a training session that was less than 3 hours long. One half day of training for the developers. It was that simple. After this training, I was available to help the user community with any questions that they had. I do have to say, I did not spend much time at all helping fix issues related to AccuRev. For any issues that did come up and I couldn’t help out with immediately, AccuRev Technical Support was always there to help. For the record, I did not attend any special AccuRev Administrators Training. AccuRev does have AccuRev Certified Engineer Training available and that was something I wanted to take. Actually, whatever administration was needed for AccuRev took place in the Austin, TX office. The person who did that did it a part time basis. This is also much different than ClearCase. I have been a full time ClearCase Administrator at several companies and that is a full time job. When I was working with ClearCase, at least 20 and up to 30 percent of my time was spent on administrative tasks related to ClearCase. So, I was able to devote that extra time to work on other types of things, like the install kits for our products using InstallShield. We had been considering hiring a consultant to do that work and we ended up saving the money that we would have spent on that.
