The AccuRev team is gearing up for an upcoming West Coast tour, first stop, San Francisco! AccuRev, along with SQE, Agile Journal, Urbancode and Rally Software, will host the popular Agile seminar, “Agile Comes to You” tomorrow, March 16th in downtown San Francisco, and Thursday, March 17th in Bellevue, WA. The complimentary Agile seminars focus on Agile development best practices, and best-of-breed solutions necessary to scale and optimize development processes and teams. So if you’re in the San Francisco or Seattle areas this week, and are interested in an Agile seminar, stop by! Going to EclipseCon? March 21st-24th we’ll be back down in Santa Clara, CA, where we’ll be exhibiting at EclipseCon 2011. We hope to see you there!
Archive for the ‘News’ category
“Agile Comes to You” Seminars Go West
March 15th, 2011 by AccuRev
A New Mindset and New Toolsets are Needed to Speed Agile Adoption
February 7th, 2011 by AccuRevIn a previous post we examined an “Agile pain points” survey that highlighted some of the top obstacles organizations are facing when trying to adopt Agile practices. Now that these obstacles have been identified, you might be asking – as we did – where do we go from here?
The Importance of Agile Tools
We think these findings reinforce the need for ALM tools to support Agile implementation, accelerate adoption and build a foundation to scale Agile. Developers need integrated, yet flexible and customizable toolsets encompassing Software Configuration Management, Build and Release Management and Agile Lifecycle Management.
Agile Roadmap
In addition to Agile tools, development organizations also need to adopt new approaches to support Agile. Here is a roadmap for organizations as they head down the Agile path:
- Take a fresh approach to capturing requirements. The first thing you should consider is that the focus of requirements in an Agile world shifts from developing a detailed specification, to collecting user stories. Having a development process and the necessary tools to support gathering, tracking and managing of user stories is crucial when going Agile.
- Invest in test. Even when not practicing explicit test-driven development, the importance of testing – unit test, regression, and system-wide testing – is considerable throughout the Agile development process no matter what method is being used.
- Release early and often. Organizations should look for planning tools that track when user stories are done and ready for customer feedback, source code tools that show where user stories are in the development process, and build and release tools that create releases continuously.
- Build In-house expertise from the outside in. Organizations should work with vendors that have a full suite of training and coaching offerings, in particular seeking those vendors that go beyond generic Agile training and instead examine the organization’s existing processes and goals and customize training for their specific needs.
- Incorporate release aspects in early Agile plans. Building in real-world items like testing and deployment will allow issues to surface early, before they become entrenched in the code base and difficult to address.
- Recognize that scaling Agile reveals dependencies between projects and teams. Having the ability to track both Agile and traditional projects in the same tool interface can prove critical to ensure a smooth scaling out process.
- Don’t forget about requirements when going “all in” with Agile. Lastly, organizations should be sure tools and processes clearly show team members all key aspects of requirements and are flexible and powerful enough to keep pace with the dynamic nature of a fully realized Agile environment.
We’d like to hear what you think – what steps have you and your organization taken to support Agile adoption? What have are some other steps organizations should consider?
For details on AccuRev’s findings and more on these recommendations, check out the full Agile Adoption Pain Points Survey report, available free for download at http://www.accurev.com/whitepaper/agile-pain-points-survey.
Opening the Desk Drawers of the AccuRev Mind
January 3rd, 2011 by jtalbottTo borrow from a common print journalism trick, consider this the cleaning out the desk drawers of my AccuRev mind. Or if you tend to avoid newspaper columnists, especially sports ones, then let’s just call this a random “did you know” or “what’s new” post. I think the last time I did one of these was in the AccuRev Version 4.5 days, and we now entered the days of AccuRev 4.9, so there might be a few things tossed in here that aren’t necessarily fresh off the presses…
AccuRev 4.9 introduces the long sought after “stale filter”. Actually, it’s an Update Preview search, but it shows not just (stale) files, but also anything that will change at update time, like moves and new elements. You can even perform actions in that search pane, like Diffs, prior to updating…
AccuRev 4.9 also brings you the -t <time_spec> argument for both stat and pop. This lets you provide a transaction or time stamp to the command so you can reference a configuration of code at a point in time without having to utilize a time-based stream.
Sticking with command-line tidbits, you can now use pop -D to populate elements without including their entire directory structure. Very useful in situations where you might have different applications contained under a root folder yet want to populate them at a top level.
Another really helpful enhancement is to the Deep Overlap search. Now when you Merge a file that is in Deep Overlap, AccuRev changes the status to (kept)(member) in the filter so that you know which files have been operated on. You also have the ability to promote from this search window, and subsequently the promoted file will no longer appear in the filter.
If you haven’t started using the AccuRev WebUI, you’re really missing out. One lesser known capability in the WebUI is the ability to take a regular query, Group by any field, and automatically convert it to a bar, line, or pie chart. This report can then be sent and accessed as a URL, and obviously can be viewed by users without installing the classic GUI.
To further bind the classic GUI and WebUI together, AccuWork issues in the classic GUI now contain a hyperlink “Issue URL” which takes you directly to the URL rendering of the issue in the WebUI. And for those with a very extensive stream structure, have you checked out the St\ream Filter to personalize and only display streams that you care about?
For folks running Continuous Integration, or for those who just want to be able to use command-line to see what’s changed in a stream over time – including inherited content! – I think you’ll be happy with this one. You can use the accurev diff command to compare the contents of a single stream with itself over a period of time, without having to create a time-based stream.
Have you noticed that when using the Stream Issue Mode in the StreamBrowser, you now see Incomplete Issues right in the “Show Active…” box attached to streams?
And lastly for now, bonus points for anyone who can comment here to point out the AccuRev command-line typo that still works as if it is spelled correctly. AccuRevers or former ones need not apply 
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