Tool Evaluation for a Project-Oriented Development Organization
Context:
The customer develops internationally leading standard software, which is globally used at over 8500 work-places in more than 260 organizations. Sybase Powerbuilder is used as a development tool; the PowerBuilder tool PBNative provides version control. However, PBNative can not create data history or create a simultaneous view of mutiple product lines. However, it does manage to provide an efficient locking mechanism and high performance.
Problem:
The users are not always able to update to the latest version, which necessitates a large number of parallel development lines. Features from newer releases must often be integrated into older releases. The ideal SCM tool was needed to manage this complex structure of development and product lines, replacing the currently-used tools and supporting controlling procedures such as Sarbanes-Oxley.
Solution:
The entire development and product line structure had previously been solved solely by means of the file system. First attempts to migrate to CVS were not satisfactory or failed completely. After having analysed the customer's development process we proposed commercial tools and one open source SCM tool.
The commercial product AccuRev was best able to map the complex product line structure as AccuRev focusses in managing complex parallel development processes and product lines. The product supports the planning of branching models, provides a general efficient locking mechanism, and can be integrated into Sybase PowerBuilder as well as into all popular IDE's by using Microsoft's Source Code Control API (SCC.
Migration of the repository was relatively trivial since the integrated SCM in Powerbuilder doesn't make use of branches, tags, labels, etc. Through the use of AccuRev a transparent and consistent state of lines across all releases can be ensured (Sarbanes-Oxley).
