AccuRev

While at the SD West conference, I've run into an interesting new SCM called AccuRev (http://www.accurev.com/). Ok, being at version 4.5 it's not exectly a newcomer, but I haven't heard of it before.

From what I've seen from the demo, the program works in a new paradigm. It adopts Perforce's metaphors of depots and workspaces and takes them to a new level by introducing the concept of a code stream. As far as I understand, the entire codebase (a depot) is represented as a tree with each node being a focal point for collecting changes. These nodes can represent projects, version branches , features, teams, etc. At the end of a tree branch, there can be a leaf node representing a particular user's workspace. Workspaces, just like in Perfoce, seem to be tied to a particular user on a particular machine.

Changes can be applied at every node and then they will stream down to child nodes and leaves. So, let's say I have a parent node for Project A and below it there will be nodes for trunk, some feature F, QA, and RC1. If QA finds a bug and I fix it, I can apply the changes at the Project A node level and have these changes automatically stream into QA, RC1, and Feature F. There are of course controls that allow a finer level of control over what gets changed, where, when and by whom.

The client UI is visual and drag and drop enabled. You can see the entire SCM tree on the screen, you can move nodes around, reconnect them, reassign workspaces to different nodes, arrange people into teams, etc. All in all it looked like a very powerful piece of software and, at $800/seat for a pro version and $1400/seat for an enterprise version, a very expensive at that.

SD West

Just got back from the Software Development conference (yeh, THE software development:) with a lot of new ideas to think about and consider: restructuring our code reviews, repositioning the testing step in the dev. process, new SCM software to look at. And there is more, it's just that I've process so much information that I need to go back to my notes and look at them all again. It's was definitely money well spent.