What's new in the last couple of years?

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Jirong Hu's picture
Jirong Hu asked on December 30, 2011 - 3:18pm | Replies (4).

Hi

I was quite active in CMCrossroads a couple of years ago. Then I spent some time in load testing, RQM and ClearCase for zOS and now RTC.

Back to SCM in general, did I miss anything? Is there anything I need to catch up? What's the new development in SCM world?

Thanks
Jirong

Tags: 
configuration management

4 Answers

Marc Girod's picture
Marc Girod replied on January 1, 2012 - 10:40pm.

I replied in advance to this question in a thread not long ago: "the end of SCM."
The obvious novelty is the success of Git and Mercurial, following Subversion.

It is worth examining this situation on several aspects.

1. These are tools created by the authors of successful Open Source projects (Apache, Linux kernel, Firefox) for their own needs.

2. This is a powerful statement about the inadequacy of the offering, hence of the state of SCM.

3. Their creations are novel in relatively modest ways: for the most, they build up a return back to the basics of source control, which Linus Torvalds termed "source archiving and distribution."

Marc

jptownsend's picture
jptownsend replied on January 4, 2012 - 10:38am.

Jirong,

First of all I have no idea what Marc is talking about, SCM is as strong as ever, Git and Mercurial are not that successful and Subversion, well you get what you pay for. Its freeware so you get nothing. A tool doesn't destroy 60 years of change in the CM and SCM and HCM fields

CM and SCM are alive and well, as Agile methodologies are becoming more popular, our field is transforming from simple version control and issue tracking to becoming Application Lifecycle Management, CM and SCM jobs are plentiful as witnessed on Monster.com.

So to paraprhase I feel like we as a field are moving into new and exciting times, finally getting recognition for what we do and getting people to understand that you need CM and SCM and HCM people in your organization, now is it a perfect world, no but we are headed in a new direction I never thought was possible.

Regards,

Joe

bglangston's picture

Hear, hear! to Joe.

As usual, I can't agree without qualification. (What else is new? If I totally agreed, Joe wouldn't know what to do with himself. Right, Joe?)

Time was that CM was for the entire life cycle. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the development world seemed to come to the understanding that it was about SW file versioning and CR's. The result is that, by and large, the original meaning of "CM" has been lost. The community then tried to differentiate between version control and the broader scope by using such compound terms as "enterprise CM," "total CM," and "full scope CM," among others.

Enter the new term, "ALM," which I maintain was coined for sales purposes.

With that said, I do agree with Joe that "...we as a field are moving into new and exciting times...," and that we are "...getting people to understand that you need CM and SCM and HCM people in your orginization..."

However, in my opinion, we still have the problem that even those who recognize the need for CM/ALM still don't have a snowball's notion of what it is.

jptownsend's picture

Billy,

Even getting partial agreement from you is a victory. :) Just kidding my friend, your opinion means alot to me and is always welcome.

I agree with your notion of ALM as well, CM, SCM and HCM have always been part of the complete lifecycle, however, it was pigeon holed into being just version control, then includes issue management, and so on and so forth.

While getting people to understand they need people to do these things didn't imply they know what they do, but at least its a step in the right direction. We have to take this one step at a time and let people know that SCM, CM and HCM folks don't hinder progress they just make sure its going in the right direction.

Regards,

Joe

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