It’s 1998. I’m just starting my job at Rational Software, supporting ClearCase. During my training and through my first few months handling customer issues, I developed a deep understanding of the complexities of SCM and the heavy-handed centralized control that ClearCase provided its customer base. Wrappers, triggers and script automation were the key to a tightly controlled, centralized development environment. In the developers’ eyes, dealing with the version control tool was just a part of doing their job.
Developers like to code, not “waste time” with tools or infrastructure. They are creators and want to create their masterpiece. Check-in, Check-out, Merge, etc. are not ways developers want to spend their time, especially if they are forced to deal with poor performance from an SCM tool, whether it’s by the tool itself, or the myriad of wrappers that were forced on top of the SCM tool their company chose. In a developers eyes, any time spent NOT writing code is wasted time.
However, despite the negative ramifications of SCM centralization and control to the developer’s productivity, there are absolute benefits to the enterprise that cannot be lost. Security, traceability, visibility and control are paramount to running a development organization.
My decision to come work at AccuRev in 2001 was based on the software’s unique ability to provide all the features the enterprise needs, while minimizing the negative impact SCM has on developer productivity. The ease at which AccuRev provides visualization and control over the entire development process was truly a game changer. And while still a centralized SCM tool, AccuRev was designed to minimize the pain developers felt during their day to day operations.
It’s now 2012 and the SCM landscape has changed dramatically for developers. De-centralized / Distributed development is all the rage now. Version control tools such as Git and Mercurial are providing developers with the experience they demand. Local copies of repositories give unparalleled performance. Strong branching models provide near painless branching and merging. Tools like Git are designed with the developer in mind. Performance, merging strength and extremely in-depth control of all operations are the focus of product features.
All that said, while distributed SCM tools are great for developers and fine for open source development, Enterprises are experiencing chaotic development and losing control in their engineering organizations. So which way do you go? Centralized appeases the Enterprise, De-Centralized appeases the developers.
The answer is both. Now that AccuRev has introduced Kando, Enterprises can maintain all the security, traceability, audit-ability, visibility and process control their business depends on, while giving their developers exactly what they want – to use Git for their day to day development.
