Helpful Tips for Choosing the Right CM Tool
A recently resurrected LinkedIn discussion on migrating from ClearCase to an open source tool got some CM professionals to agree about the tool selection process. “Never choose the tools first! Define the process and configure the tool,” argued one of the participants named Patrick. To me, this is good advice in a world of 1G and 2G CM tools.
But be careful. Tools are changing. As next generation tools emerge on the scene, it’s perhaps more important to pay attention to what the CM Process Improvement Center (CMPIC ) stresses in its software CM course designed to focus on capabilities first, even before tools and process—or at least in concert with them.
This is why, if you look at tools—and first looks tend to be to open source tools—you’ll first find specific capabilities for version control. You might say to yourself, “Yes, that’s what we need,” before looking at the entire process. You might acquire the tool (even at no commercial cost) and, after spending untold resources in education and trial, find that you’re now sucked into the solution because of the resources you spent.
Still, it is a great version control tool. However, things are starting to fall apart for the rest of the application lifecycle. Perhaps it’s a year or two before you get around to the rest of the process.
I recently got off a call with a client who now thinks that the move to Subversion (SVN)—along with supporting third party tools—was maybe shortsighted. Rather than diving in to a costly commercial solution, they will try another variant of SVN, hoping to minimize the impact. What they should be doing is looking at 3G and 4G CM and ALM tools. For a definition of 1G through 4G tools, see the last half of my CM Journal article, “Evaluating and Selecting a CM/ALM Tool.”
In a world of 3G and 4G tools, the tools themselves can help you define the process and identify parts of the process you didn’t really consider. Most will give you a strong starting point, and because they are 3G and 4G tools, administration will drop dramatically, reliability will increase, and configuring the tools to their specific as well as future requirements will be quick and easy.
3G and 4G tools focus on low costs and a rich set of capabilities (not just features) that can be knit together into the ideal process for a project. They include process management and user interface generation components that move your focus from “What can we do?” to “How do we want this to behave?”
In a 3G and 4G world, capabilities come first.
