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INDUSTRY WATCH: Change for Change's Sake
By David Rubinstein
 April 1, 2004 — Sometimes, change for the sake of change—or in this case, for the sake of change/configuration management—actually can result in advancement.
First, consider last month’s acquisition by Serena Software Inc. of Merant Inc., which has reduced the number of vendors in the space. Before the acquisition, and according to 2002 license and maintenance revenue figures from IDC, Rational was the market leader with US$286 million. Merant was second at $102 million and Serena was third at $89 million. Now, Serena clearly has closed that gap, and stands as an independent vendor not seen as so closely tied to any one development and deployment platform.
Some say the acquisition is the result of a maturing market. Others see it as the result of a de-emphasis on version control and a new focus on workflow and process management.
Serena’s strength lay in its mainframe solutions, while Merant’s was in its distributed solutions. A nice fit, right? It certainly has the potential. However, this integration will be tougher than the one Serena faced when it acquired TeamShare. There are cultural issues involved in merging international offices, and unique problems that arise when a smaller company tries to digest a larger one.
Also, there are many little kingdoms at Merant that might disappear as Serena integrates the product lines. One of them is Collage, a Web content management suite. Serena already attempted an entry into the content management space a few years ago but killed the effort when it failed to gain traction. Will it do the same with Collage?
And what of Merant’s PVCS Pro? The low-end CM market, where small group projects are done, is having the life sucked out of it by open source. And late last year, Microsoft launched a US$1,200 product into this space—Systems Management Server 2003. This, along with IBM’s building of the Rational CM tools into its development environment, is having the effect of commoditizing the market.
Uttam Narsu, a principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said many of today’s SCM solutions lack the flexibility enterprise shops need to manage and merge multiple development processes used throughout their organization, although he noted more offerings are building these capabilities in—mostly through acquisition, as Serena did with TeamShare and as IBM added to Rational.
The market, Narsu said, is fairly complex and somewhat unusual in that there is no clear leader. “The closest is [IBM’s Rational] ClearCase, which has 30 percent maybe. That’s not necessarily an 800-pound gorilla. So perhaps a fresh approach isn’t a bad idea.”
Enter a small start-up called AccuRev, which markets a CM solution that the company claims is the first clean-sheet approach to the problem in more than two decades, and which Narsu described as “certainly innovative.”
Most configuration management systems on the market today, according to AccuRev director of product management Bob Manning, trace their roots to the file-based, SCCS client/server version control system introduced for Unix some 20 years ago. “Products that have retained that core DNA for SCCS can’t meet today’s development needs,” he said.
Today’s tools are somewhat dated, Narsu agreed, with “a lot of dependent pieces. Either everything goes in [to a revision] or nothing does.”
AccuRev/CM uses a graphical, object-oriented approach to configuration management and issue tracking by considering a version of a project as its own entity, raising the level of abstraction above the file level. AccuRev starts with a Stream Browser, which is similar to branch systems in other SCM systems, Manning explained.
Each stream provides the location of an individual development effort and is created as an object. The top of the stream can be the working codebase, for example, and individual developer workstations can be built off that stream, and the tool automatically populates the workstations with the files of that codebase.
Streams also can be set up for maintenance and updates, and additional workstations can be created, for example, to change the development process, so that all developers working on a particular codebase, say, must put all changes into a review stream before they are fed back into the code. Versions can be frozen to ensure an audit trail for the codebase.
In the AccuRev browser, the amount of time development teams spend in rules meetings, drawing branches and workflows on whiteboards that then have to be recreated in a model is greatly reduced, Manning said. “Our browser is the whiteboard,” he said. “When everyone agrees it’s right, it’s already implemented.”
The real question, though, is this: How sophisticated do these types of solutions have to become for development shops to be able to get their work done, or should development managers be looking at ways to improve the processes under which applications are developed in the first place?
David Rubinstein is executive editor of SD Times. |
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