Agile SCM January 2007 - Looking Back to Move Forward

• , blog-entry

Interestingly enough, with all that marketing buzz, Rational was also very clear about that fact that Jazz would not be released until after 2006. So look for even more "hype" and "hope" in 2007 when the first releases of Jazz become available, and especially when the core Jazz infrastructure is released as open-source under the auspices of Eclipse project. It will be interesting to see the impact this has on the Eclipse ALF and Corona projects (which Jazz doesn't currently use, althought it could conceivably make use of Corona in the future) and the Eclipse BIRT project (which Jazz does make use of). Current marketing would suggest that Jazz is the new vision, or more aptly, more likely, the new open-source hope to slay (or at least compete with) MS VSTS

Trends in ALM Tool Functionality
With the MS VSTS and Rational Jazz marketing, collaboration and collaborative development environments (CDEs). And with "Agile" becoming mainstream, and getting used more and more as a marketing term, "Agile" and "Collaboration" may very well be the most frequently used marketing terms (with the possible exception of "Governance" and "Compliance"). When it comes down to the details of specific functionality, we've been forecasting the following since 2005 to happen during 2005-2008:

Component-Based Versions (Baselines)
Many version control tools were already supporting the notion of versions as things that encompass more than just one file or one directory. More tools are starting to provide automatic support for capturing versions of the entire project or repository. There still seem to be relatively few that implement the notion of a "component" (or "version group") separately from the notion of a project or repository. In some cases, the notin of a "project" is equivalent to a component, but in most it is not. And more often than note, most tools today consider a "project" to be either "the whole repository" or else a top-level directory in the repository. With a select few exceptions, there is still little automated support for the notion of a "component" as a versioned group of files that evolve together, and that don't comprise the entire repository.

Composite Streaming & Baselining
Here there has been very little activity or evolution. I'm aware of at most one or two tools that support the notion of a "composite baseline", and none that support the notion of a "component of components" or of a "stream of streams." It seems we'll have to wait a bit longer to see this one. Perhaps we won't see this until product-line-oriented practices and software-product-line development become popular enough that they start impacting the product roadmaps of tool vendors.

Task/Activity-Based Development
Task-based Development (TBD) does seem to be on the rise, in practice. There doesn't seem to be a lot more tools adding it that didn't already have it. There does seem to be more open-source offerings and integrations with tracking tools making this easier to do for one's existing tool. So the trend itself is on the rise, there seems to be less demand for tool vendors to add it to systems that didn't already have it (other than via integration with something else).  

Improved Refactoring Support
We have been seeing this, and the trend has definitely risen in the past two years. It may have already peaked. The capability to version directories and track renaming certainly does seem to be on the rise.

Continuous Integration "Architecture" and Enterprise Continuous Integration/Staging
This is perhaps one of the areas where the most strides have been made. With newcomers and/or new acquisitions and the marketing for the likes of Buildforge,