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.

After the import was done, developers were able to create projects and streams very easily. It did take a little while for everyone to get used to the concept of projects and streams.  I had used ClearCase UCM in the past.  So, I had no problem relating to these concepts.  For the rest of the development team, the concepts of projects and streams was very easy to get used to and made a lot of sense to them.   There was a slight learning curve for the developers with using some of the AccuRev utilities like the Version Tree Browser which looked different than the one that they were used to in ClearCase.  There were some concerns about using the AccuRev Merge Tool.  However, I attributed that to the fact that the developers may not have completely mastered the concept of merging in ClearCase, since to me it appeared to me much easier to merge source code in AccuRev than in ClearCase. The ability of the development team to quickly grasp the concepts of AccuRev saved a lot of time that would have been spent training them.  I literally was able to sit with new people on the development team and within a half hour, they were up and running with AccuRev.

Overall, I think that our use of AccuRev made our source code management much easier.  The ability to use the Graphical User Interface for most of our work was very beneficial to us. It was great to be able to create streams (or even projects) based off of a particular stream and to be able to literally see that being done on the screen, for example.  The snapshot concept also worked well for us.  It was also very easy to find the differences between build snapshots.  This helped us produce metrics for management very quickly.  We also had no issues implementing AccuRev commands into our build scripts which made our job easier.  Before we used AccuRev, we would run the builds and access CVS databases in the Austin office.  The builds had to be run at night because the builds took so long copying the code over the WAN from Austin to Andover.  After switching over to AccuRev, the fact that we could access the the AccuRev repositories in Austin directly over the WAN allowed the builds to complete much quicker than when we were doing them using CVS.  We never figured out why the copy of the CVS code took so long, but I can tell you that after switching to AccuRev, the build performance improved at least 25 to 30 percent. We could even run them during the daytime when needed, which was very beneficial to our development team.

As I mentioned above,  AccuRev Technical Support was very helpful with any questions or concerns that we had and I can never say enough good things about them.  AccuRev Tech Support always answered their phone quickly and followed up with us on anything we worked with them on.  Based on my 3 years of experience of using AccuRev, I would highly recommend it to development teams that are deciding on a Source Code Management tool.