Is ClearCase near its end-of-life with most new dev in Rational Team Concert?

Is ClearCase near its end-of-life with most new dev in Rational Team Concert?

I was just wondering what the group thought.

Is ClearCase/ClearQuest nearing end of life since most of the new development at IBM/Rational is being done on Rational Team Concert?

It seems like all the new patches for both ClearCase and ClearQuest revolve around making it play nice inside Team Concert.

Answer Vote

With RTC, IBM are only trying to get back in line with the rest of the modern ALM products. Like it or not, the notion today with most software products is to sacrifice flexibility in favor of usability.

I guess that, for most development efforts, all you need is the ability to quickly setup a project and apply one of the cookie-cutter methodologies.

UCM was a wrong step in that direction, something IBM fixed with RTC.

ClearCase Base was designed to be extremely flexible and configurable, and my guess is that anyone who is using it right now, will continue using it for a long time. Anyone else has already moved, or considering a move, to a more modern tool.

ClearQuest is a different story. Considering the amazing selection of useful, feature-rich, and cheap issue-tracking tools out there, I'd say its days are numbered.

Answer Vote

From our point of view, administrators in a company with 1.500 CC users, RTC is spooky.

If a project starts, we create a new cc region containing a set of VOBs.
To achieve the same state with RTC, you'll have to install one RTC server per project, because you can't connect several databases to on server.
On our site, there would be around 30 servers we would have to pay for, 30 http, websphere and RTC server to care for, installing patches and so one.

You want to move a component from one repository to an other due to a change of responsibility? No way.

You want to split a repository due to sizing/performance issues? No way.

You want to recover one element, because it was destroyed? No way, you'll have to do a rollback of the hole repository.

The domain name of your company changes, due to a new IT infrastructure or because a department was sold, you'll have to keep the old name system, because you can't change the name of a RTC server.

So, from the backend point of view, RTC is not able to replace CC in the next years.
And RTC is definitively not designed to replace CC and CQ in any time.
This is what IBM says.

greetings georg.

Answer Vote

Rational Team Concert is absolutely fantastic. You can get a 10 user community edition license for free in order to check it out. ClearCase is definitely going to be sunset - right after the last IBM mainframe ships :-)

Seriously, way too many people are using ClearCase for IBM to really drop support for the product anytime soon. Now that said, it is true that all of the development and new features are likely to be focused on RTC. I will also remind everyone that back in the late 1990's IBM had a fantastic version control tool called Team Connection. Then IBM purchased Rational Software and deemed ClearCase to be a better choice than Team Connection which had an excellent usage paradigm. (Trying to remember which tool Team Connection came from.)

So IBM is not beyond sunsetting a product but a lot of people still use (and love ClearCase). I don't expect it to off the radar any time soon and I still get LOTS of Calls for ClearCase jobs.

Bob

Answer Vote

Quite obviously. Of course, one may hope that IBM will support their existing customers, but they are not really developing the product anymore.

Just look at the v8 non-release!

One other symptom is that ClearCase is in fact a poor plugin in the version control slot in RTC, which is better suited for e.g. Git.

Of course, I have shown for the past 10 years that Rational took with UCM a deadly strategy, doomed to fail because based on a bad design. This has led IBM to more or less drop the most sophisticated and interesting parts of ClearCase: dynamic views, clearmake, MultiSite... UCM makes no use of them, on the contrary: it is best suited for a centralized hub accessed with web clients using snapshot views.

Marc

4 Answers

Answer Vote

Quite obviously. Of course, one may hope that IBM will support their existing customers, but they are not really developing the product anymore.

Just look at the v8 non-release!

One other symptom is that ClearCase is in fact a poor plugin in the version control slot in RTC, which is better suited for e.g. Git.

Marc

Answer Vote

So IBM is not beyond sunsetting a product but a lot of people still use (and love ClearCase). I don't expect it to off the radar any time soon and I still get LOTS of Calls for ClearCase jobs.

Bob

Answer Vote

From our point of view, administrators in a company with 1.500 CC users, RTC is spooky.

You want to move a component from one repository to an other due to a change of responsibility? No way.

You want to split a repository due to sizing/performance issues? No way.

You want to recover one element, because it was destroyed? No way, you'll have to do a rollback of the hole repository.

The domain name of your company changes, due to a new IT infrastructure or because a department was sold, you'll have to keep the old name system, because you can't change the name of a RTC server.

So, from the backend point of view, RTC is not able to replace CC in the next years.
And RTC is definitively not designed to replace CC and CQ in any time.
This is what IBM says.

greetings georg.

Answer Vote

I guess that, for most development efforts, all you need is the ability to quickly setup a project and apply one of the cookie-cutter methodologies.

UCM was a wrong step in that direction, something IBM fixed with RTC.

ClearQuest is a different story. Considering the amazing selection of useful, feature-rich, and cheap issue-tracking tools out there, I'd say its days are numbered.