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CM+ Enterprise Sets the Standard for Next Generation ALM Suites

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Written by Patrick Egan

Monday, 10 October 2005 16:00

What do you mean you have never heard of CM+ (that’s pronounced CM Plus)? CM+ from Neuma Technology has been around for quite some time, but the company has only recently begun really marketing the product in earnest. Instead, Neuma focused on listening to customers to design and fine tune the high-performance STS repository that is the foundation of the CM+ products. This strategy has produced both a rock solid technology and architecture, and a very happy and loyal user base.

CM+ comes in two flavors, CM+ Professional and CM+ Enterprise. CM+ Enterprise is Neuma's solution for full Application Lifecycle Management where the emphasis is on end-to-end “Change Management” across all aspects of a product lifecycle. CM+ Professional provides a subset of facilities featured in CM+ Enterprise focused more specifically on Software Configuration Management including; Activity Tracking, Build and Release Management. Both products share the same repository technology so the integration and upgrading is completely seamless

STS Repository, the Beast Behind the Beauty

The real power behind CM+ is the STS repository, a real work horse that combines a hybrid database (object and relational), a transaction engine, a workflow engine and command language in a single package. No other database technology is required which completely eliminates the cost and overhead of purchasing and maintaining a 3rd party RDBMS. This also allows CM+ to really leverage the power of the repository in ways other tools do not or can not. Neuma designed and optimized the STS repository for CM, permitting relational, hierarchical and revision-based data navigation. Additionally, the STS repository is truly platform independent. It is completely pick-up-and-drop-down portable between platforms.

STS was designed for speed and reliability, and even on very large CM applications with several million data records, CM+ gives sub-second response times, allowing hyper-data and drill down operations at the speed of the user. Its transaction engine provides a complete trace and audit of all repository changes with automatic transaction journaling and repository checkpoints. The fully executable transaction journals support hot backups, rollbacks and outage recovery. This provides two highly desirable byproducts beyond reliability; warm or hot standby for instant disaster recovery, and real-time, real-world support for multiple geographically distributed sites.

Real-world Multiple Site Support

CM+ MultiSite is an optional component for CM+ that probably ought to be a standard feature but we are talking “real-world” here so things come at a cost. But the cost of CM+ Multi-Site does not come in terms normally associated with the deployment of other “multi-site” solutions. There are no administrative costs associated with pre-planning how to split files across sites and multiple servers, or deciding or how and when to re-synch them. CM+ MultiSite works by automatically sending all transactions to all sites to be processed in the same order, whether it is a source-code change, new problem record, process change, or even a database schema change. As such, each site contains a complete replication of the other sites. It is as if everyone was working from a single central repository. According to Neuma, transactions committed at a slave or master site typically appear at all sites in a few seconds.

Also important in “real-world” organizations is CM+ MultiSite’s ability to automatically recover from any network outage, ensuring that all transactions are sent and processed in order once a network link is restored. This automatic recovery provides three nice capabilities. It ensures that remote locations not connected by completely reliable networks, such as offshore development sites, are able to operate continually. Remote users who often work disconnected from the network such as laptop users or contract developers are also able to work independently and then have their environments synchronized as soon as they re-establish connection. Also if one site is off line for an extended period of time, clients may choose to attach to the next closest site to perform work providing instant recovery in the case of a full site outage.

Streams of Change Management Consciousness

In a single integrated solution, CM+ combines configuration management with product management and process control, covering all the phases of software development lifecycle (Process Modeling and Workflow Automation, Requirements Gathering, Document Management, Project and Activity tracking, Product Feature Management, Problem Tracking, Configuration Management, Build and Release Automation). The thing that sets CM+ apart from other integrated tool suites is that it does not focus on each of these ALM roles independently. CM+ puts the emphasis on how changes are made to a product and focuses on the way products are actually designed, developed and deployed by teams of stakeholders. In Neuma’s vision of Change Management, a road-map of a product’s lifecycle is represented as a series of forward moving parallel streams of activity. The evolution of the product is manipulated through well engineered changes and a managed change control process. Many different types of product stakeholders participate in this evolution, each performing a “task” according to their role in a specific stream of development. The streams act as pipelines for requirements, features, problems and change packages and allow users to both control and visualize what tasks are going on and what changes are being made in any stage of development. In this way CM+ provides full traceability between deliverables and the upstream artifacts that drove them.

Have it Your Way

With the broad reach of potential stakeholders involved with CM+, it is critically important to be able to configure how each will interact with the tool and the process. CM+ is highly customizable allowing users to easily configure and customize all aspects of the environment including the data schema, process workflow, command rules and triggers, and role-based, user interface. Based on their role, each participant is presented with a user interface providing a unique view into the project showing only the tasks they are allowed to perform and the items to which they have access. Although it is easily configurable the user interface is the one area that could use a little face lift to make features more intuitive for various stakeholders. Although, having said that, I suppose that the strength in a tool like CM+ is that you will not see the user interface too often.

Costs

CM+ can be purchased with either concurrent or fixed user licensing. Total costs for CM+ Enterprise range from $1,000 to $1,400 per user while CM+ Professional will typically range in the $850 to $1,200 range. CM+ MultiSite may be added for $4,995 per site with no additional per user costs. Annual maintenance is 18% of the list price.

Summary

CM+ provides a unique take on end-to-end Application Lifecycle Management, and does it with a powerful architecture built from the ground up to support a real-world notion of how product development is done. Neuma also makes it easy to get in the game with CM+ Professional and even easier to upgrade to CM+ Enterprise when you are ready. You can download a fully functional copy of either product and be up and running in minutes. Whether you are looking for easy to use and affordable SCM solution or a complete ALM suite of tools, CM+ should be on your short list.

Company Contact

Neuma Technology Inc.
#51 - 5450 Canotek Rd.,
Ottawa, ON, Canada.
K1J 9G3
Tel: 613-749-9450
www.neuma.com
sales@neuma.com

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