Read my earlier post: Fortune 500 Software Company Answers Your Questions on Using AccuRev

Up until fairly recently I had never worked anywhere that was able to do parallel development without it becoming a nightmare. Individual contributor or manager, we just seemed unable to find that secret magical incantation that would lead to a truly successful parallel development cycle.

Every time the team had a different plan, and the project’s champion would trumpet why this time ‘things would be different’. But in the end, we always failed in one of two areas (sometimes both):

• The quality of the software suffered dramatically

• We lost control of the schedule and we were forced to ship late

I actually worked on one project where the resulting release was so bad that a few weeks after release we had to pull the product off the shelves and work frantically to repair the damage.

Then a few years ago my team was looking for a new software configuration management tool to use. We started out wanting ClearCase, but after much deliberation, decided on Accurev. At first, we didn’t realize the power of the tool now in our control. But after a release or two, we started to realize what we had and adjusted our process accordingly and began to achieve very successful, high quality, and on time releases done in parallel with one another. We had found the holy grail of project management!

We started to understand not just what the best practices were with Accurev, but to understand what we were getting by following them. We made other changes to our processes that helped as well, but I give a lot of the credit to the tool-set for helping us in the right direction.

We started out performing a round-table series on our past projects, looking for common themes, and then choosing the top themes and seeing how we could use Accurev to solve them, and here are some of the things we found:

Problem: Often parallel projects require extensive code changes to the same files, leading to a need for developers to communicate what is being done to which files and when. Often this communication is not handled well.

Solution: Accurev’s work in progress and annotate commands, as well as the version browser allow developers to quickly view who else is making changes to the files that they care about, and what is being done to them. Now developers can pro-actively gather the information they need instead of depending on someone else remembering to tell them.

Problem: Often projects have late phase merge points which are both complicated and error prone. In addition since merging is generally done in the mainline, the entire release can be held when any two projects try to merge together.

Solution: By allowing stream definitions to be dynamic, Accurev allows developers to create common merge streams ad hoc at no cost, and to join the projects without effecting any other users. It also provides excellent trivial merge capabilities that save the users much of the error prone work, calling out only the non-obvious decision points which greatly simplifies the merge task.

Problem: Often bug fixes get made to one ongoing project, but developers forget to make the same fixes to other active lines of development.

Solution: Using change packages users can quickly make changes, move them to all appropriate locations, and quickly verify that the tasks were completed successfully. Using the stream inheritance feature minimizes the number of lines where a developer must make a fix for his coworkers to take advantage of it. This greatly lightens the load on developers and cuts down on the chance that something will be forgotten.

Problem: Ensuring 100% reproducibility of a build from pristine sources is a huge challenge. Changes to the build system environment, tools and code changes can all effect your ability to make a minor fix to released software.

Solution: By keeping your complete build system (environment, tools, sources) all in Accurev, and by using a snapshot you are able to guarantee 100% that what you try to build today is the same as what your built the day the snapshot was taken. Unlike a label, a snapshot is forever! This enables you to reduce the regression test matrix and focus on only the changes that developers make to the released software.

While I am sure that other SCM tools can offer similar results if you know where you are starting and know where you want to go. But what I marvel at is that using Accurev really lead us to the cup so that we could drink from it and enjoy the benefits of successful parallel development.

Have you seen the AccuRev 2-minute demo?

Related Recipes: AccuRev + Eclipse + Ruby.

In this developer-centric recipe I am going to setup a power-tool trifecta consisting of Eclipse, JIRA, and AccuRev. I’m not talking about installing each independently. No, no, no. This recipe is going to take things one step further and configure full bidirectional integrations for a wickedly powerful, fully integrated development environment where the majority of common day-to-day development tasks can be done right within Eclipse (right picture). Integrations are the crux of setting up a best-of-breed tool strategy and if you use these three tools you definitely want them talking together (left picture). Enough chop, let’s rock.

Install Applications

Let’s start by covering the basics and installing the latest versions of all three tools.

1. Install AccuRev 4.6.x. download. Follow the install wizard. See the quick setup guide to import code and setup streams [Windows page 1 / Linux-page 13].
2. Install Eclipse 3.3.x. download. Follow the install wizard. See documentation if needed.
3. Install JIRA 3.12.x. download. Follow these instructions.

At this point, you have three independent tools installed. Developers can checkin/checkout code from AccuRev, use Eclipse to modify the source code, and track bug/feature development with JIRA. In all, not a bad setup. But toggling between all these tools just takes valuable time away from coding and there is no mashing of logically related meta-data to generate useful reports… such as:

• “Which files/lines fixed issue #1234?”
• “Was bug #5678 fixed in mainline, 2.x, and 1.x codelines?”
• “Release is this Friday. How many issues are unresolved in the QA area and who are we waiting on?”
• “Which fixes went into Release 4.5.101?”
• “If I start working on the 4.x codeline, which known fixes will I be compiling against?”

Integrate Eclipse + AccuRev

Let’s eliminate jumping between Eclipse and the AccuRev CLI or StreamBrowser GUI. Rather, why not just keep/promote/update/merge directly within Eclipse. You can install our native Eclipse plugin via the Eclipse software updater.

1. Help –> Software Updates –> Find/Install
2. Select ‘Seach for new features to install’
3. Create ‘New Remote Site’ named ‘AccuRev’ with URL http://www.accurev.com/download/eclipseupdate/32
4. Checkbox ‘AccuRev’ and select Finish

When you create a new Project, choose to “Checkout from AccuRev.” Now the Eclipse ‘Team’ menu has a sleu of AccuRev commands available for inline use and your file navigator has icons for version control status. Sweet. Note: there is an AccuRev quickstart PDF located in your Eclipse plugin directory (e.g. /opt/eclipse/plugins/com.accurev.eclipse_4.6.1.32/UsingAB4Eclipse.pdf).

Integrate Eclipse + JIRA

Have you heard of the Eclipse Mylyn project? Seriously, it’ll bring a tear to your eye. In short, Mylyn is a generic framework for ‘task management’ within Eclipse and has a number of connectors to tools like JIRA, Bugzilla, and Trac. Guess what? You can interact with JIRA directly within Eclipse. It’s sick! seriously. Once again, you can install directly from the Eclipse software updater. First install the Mylyn framework and then the JIRA connector.

1. Install Mylyn 2.0. Follow this setup guide. Basically, just like the AccuRev plugin above, create a remote updater site with this URL: http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/e3.3
2. Install JIRA Connector. Follow the short setup guide provided by Atlassian.

As a developer, your world just got a whole lot better. Not only can you commit/update file changes directly within AccuRev, now you can open/close/update JIRA issues all without leaving Eclipse. Nuts!

Integrate AccuRev + JIRA

The final piece to the puzzle. Wait? What does hooking AccuRev to JIRA actually mean?!

Lets take a step back. Back in the day, using one of those other traditional branch-based SCM tools, you probably entered your bug #id into the commit comment. Commit 10 files. Enter bug #1234. Commit another 7 files. Enter same bug #1234. Very loose. And you probably had some validation and reporting scripts all stacked on top to keep things (hobbled) together. At the end of the day, this was far from a ‘tight’ integration and a struggle to maintain and enforce. Answering the simple question “which files -and- lines were fixed for bug #1234″ was not easy (probably impossible!).

AccuRev Change Packages. AccuRev has an out-of-the-box feature called Change Packages that natively tracks a set of files (as patches) regardless of the number of commits. Change packages are first class citizens in AccuRev. You can promote multiple times to the same change package and even remove files. The trick is to understand that a change package has a 1-to-1 relationship with… an issue! And those issues can come from JIRA. So as you work in your AccuRev workspace coding day-to-day you can promote your changes and assign them to a JIRA issue. Then make more changes and promote to the same issue. Think of it like this: creating a feature or fix may take 1 day or 100 days; 1 commit or 50 commits; Change packages don’t care. They just track the current set of files that you claim are ‘logically’ related as part of a fix or feature. That’s it! I’ll keep this short, but basically, you can now use the change package / issue as a new, first-class currency for promoting further up and/or patching those changes to other codelines! It’s very powerful. See pg 33 of our Concepts Guide for details. But I digress.

Back to the recipe. Hooking up AccuRev and JIRA means that AccuRev receives issues from JIRA and JIRA receives meta-data such as fixed files and versions for each issue. The setup requires our own connector technology called AccuBridge for JIRA. It’s pretty easy to setup and simply requires mapping JIRA fields to AccuRev fields and setting up the data synchronization. There is a well written ‘quick start’ guide to walk you through the entire setup process.

1. Install AccuBridge for JIRA. download (link half-way down). Follow the setup guide located in the download package: doc/ais4jira_quick.pdf. [Note: Additional licensing may be required]
2. Enable Change Packages. See pg 75 of the Admin Guide. Basically, you need to tell AccuRev ‘when’ to prompt users for issues, ‘which’ issues to query for, and which data columns to display in the lists. [Note: AccuRev Enterprise Edition is required]

At this point, developers are promoting file changes to JIRA issues and JIRA can report on ‘who’ fixed ‘which’ files for any given bug/feature/task. Now that’s what I call traceability!

All Together Now!

With everything hooked up, what do we have? Simple. As a developer you can do just about everything directly within Eclipse. Edit files. Commit and update changes from AccuRev. Create issues and update comments/status/fields in JIRA. And behind the scenes, the JIRA records are being annotated by AccuRev as files are promoted out of Eclipse. Eclipse is your one-stop-shop workbench for developing, tracking changes, and managing task workflow (see picture).

Next we’ll add a build tool to the mix that integrates with AccuRev, JIRA, and Eclipse… But that’s for another day. Sounds great though, doesn’t it!

/happy coding/ – dave