Read my earlier post: Fortune 500 Software Company Answers Your Questions on Using AccuRev
Up until fairly recently I had never worked anywhere that was able to do parallel development without it becoming a nightmare. Individual contributor or manager, we just seemed unable to find that secret magical incantation that would lead to a truly successful parallel development cycle.
Every time the team had a different plan, and the project’s champion would trumpet why this time ‘things would be different’. But in the end, we always failed in one of two areas (sometimes both):
- The quality of the software suffered dramatically
- We lost control of the schedule and we were forced to ship late
I actually worked on one project where the resulting release was so bad that a few weeks after release we had to pull the product off the shelves and work frantically to repair the damage.
Then a few years ago my team was looking for a new software configuration management tool to use. We started out wanting ClearCase, but after much deliberation, decided on Accurev. At first, we didn’t realize the power of the tool now in our control. But after a release or two, we started to realize what we had and adjusted our process accordingly and began to achieve very successful, high quality, and on time releases done in parallel with one another. We had found the holy grail of project management!
We started to understand not just what the best practices were with Accurev, but to understand what we were getting by following them. We made other changes to our processes that helped as well, but I give a lot of the credit to the tool-set for helping us in the right direction.
We started out performing a round-table series on our past projects, looking for common themes, and then choosing the top themes and seeing how we could use Accurev to solve them, and here are some of the things we found:
Problem: Often parallel projects require extensive code changes to the same files, leading to a need for developers to communicate what is being done to which files and when. Often this communication is not handled well.
Solution: Accurev’s work in progress and annotate commands, as well as the version browser allow developers to quickly view who else is making changes to the files that they care about, and what is being done to them. Now developers can pro-actively gather the information they need instead of depending on someone else remembering to tell them.
Problem: Often projects have late phase merge points which are both complicated and error prone. In addition since merging is generally done in the mainline, the entire release can be held when any two projects try to merge together.
Solution: By allowing stream definitions to be dynamic, Accurev allows developers to create common merge streams ad hoc at no cost, and to join the projects without effecting any other users. It also provides excellent trivial merge capabilities that save the users much of the error prone work, calling out only the non-obvious decision points which greatly simplifies the merge task.
Problem: Often bug fixes get made to one ongoing project, but developers forget to make the same fixes to other active lines of development.
Solution: Using change packages users can quickly make changes, move them to all appropriate locations, and quickly verify that the tasks were completed successfully. Using the stream inheritance feature minimizes the number of lines where a developer must make a fix for his coworkers to take advantage of it. This greatly lightens the load on developers and cuts down on the chance that something will be forgotten.
Problem: Ensuring 100% reproducibility of a build from pristine sources is a huge challenge. Changes to the build system environment, tools and code changes can all effect your ability to make a minor fix to released software.
Solution: By keeping your complete build system (environment, tools, sources) all in Accurev, and by using a snapshot you are able to guarantee 100% that what you try to build today is the same as what your built the day the snapshot was taken. Unlike a label, a snapshot is forever! This enables you to reduce the regression test matrix and focus on only the changes that developers make to the released software.
While I am sure that other SCM tools can offer similar results if you know where you are starting and know where you want to go. But what I marvel at is that using Accurev really lead us to the cup so that we could drink from it and enjoy the benefits of successful parallel development.
Have you seen the AccuRev 2-minute demo?
