picking the right CM tool

arizona fever valley

One of the most popular topics in the CM field always comes back to "how do I pick the BEST CM tool?" Most people believe that picking out the right tool will solve all the big problems - so the debate rages on. Should I go with IBM's ClearCase or an Open Source product like Subversion or any number of popular CM tools on the market today. Frankly, I am tools agnostic. I have seen the worst tools (from a technical perspective) work just fine on some teams and the best tools fail miserably (usually because the company would not invest in training). So how does one pick a good CM tool?

Training is the number one success factor, but perception and even community folklore also weigh in pretty heavily. I remember one colleage who firmly believed that his home-spun scripts wrapped around SCCS were the best possible version control tool on earth. Another colleague wrote his set of wrapper scripts around ClearCase to make ClearCase look like CVS! (This was a very painful experience!)

Today there are a lot of excellent CM solutions out there. Some of my favorite include: ClearCase, Accurev, MKS, Subversion, Perforce and currently I am working with StarTeam from Borland. I have personally taught hundreds (750+) to use ClearCase/Multisite and ClearQuest. In my own ancient history I have worked with PVCS, CVS/RCS/SCCS, VSS and my beloved Team Connection (support dropped by IBM years ago). My first love was the old VAX VMS VAXSET which included a code management system. Feel free to send me a note with your views about these and other CM solutions on the market - particularly if they are not on my list here.

When I am picking a CM solution I always a number of questions:
1. how large will the team be?
2. where are the users located?
3. what platforms are they working on (e.g. Unix/Windows)?
4. how many variants in the code will they need to support
(read branch and merging here)?
5. what technologies will they support (if you working on .net and C# then we should take a look at TFS which replaces the the old VSS from Microsoft)?
6. What kind of budget do I need to purchase and support?
7. How much training and administration will be required?

There are certainly a lot more factors to consider when purchasing a new CM tool.
What factors do you personally consider?

Drop me a line and we'll add your views to the list! 

Bob Aiello
Editor in Chief
CM Crossroads
raiello [at] acm.org
http://www.linkedin.com/in/BobAiello

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guru<->shishya said:

	... My users were very happy with CMVC/TeamConenction from IBM. What is the equivalent tool or close to.. to manage releases/parallel developement/propagating changes withoout merging? The current tool is not helping them much...
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September 24, 2010
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