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.