Agile SCM January 2007 - Looking Back to Move Forward

Electric-cloud, and the increase in books on systems such as Maven, CruiseControl, and many other tools (both commercial and open-source), systems, servers, and architectures for continuous (or very frequent) integration seem to be getting much more attention both from tools vendors and from projects.

Testing Framework Integration
Perhaps we simply haven't been hanging out in the right circles, but this one doesn't seem to be getting as much attention as we originally suspected. It certainly seems to be on the rise, but some of us had expected this to keep pace with the rising spread of continuous integration practices and automated build architectures.

Private Branches/Streams and Private Versions
As project-oriented (stream-based) branching has gained wider use, so has the use of private branches/streams and private versions as a practice. AccuRev seems to be one of the tools leading the way in this area, with help from old standbys like Perforce and Clearcase, and relative newcomers like PureCM, Seapine, OurayCM, SpectrumSCM, Hansky Firefly, SnapshotCM, Plastic SCM and more. (And let's not forget about CM+, which was one of the earliest tools to implement the notion of streams not merely as project-oriented branches, but also as first class objects with additional useful properties.)

There are even more tools that take a Bitkeeper or GNU-Arch style of approach to decentralized repositories where each workspace is a first-class repository (thus providing full-blown private version without requiring private branches/streams). New kids on the block seem to be Mercurial Hg and Bzr 

Continuous Coordination
This one is hard to tell. The emphasis on distributed development and of collaborative environments and their corresponding collaboration architectures seems to indicate this is coming more into the forefront. Architectures such as those from Collabnet, Rational Jazz, and MS VSTS seem to indicate we'll be seeing more of this to come.

Workflow and Promotion Hierarchy

Very slow progress on this one ... there seems to be more emphasis on this in tracking systems than in version control tools (or their integrations). You would think that Architectures and frameworks such as MS VSTS, ALF & Corona, and Jazz would bring this more into the forefront. The Scarab project reached version 1.0 in 2006 with very little hoopla. Atlassian's Jira seems to be the leader in this area among Agile shops.

 

More/better integration with IDEs ...
and with agile-friendly Project Management & Test tools, and even Instant Messaging, Collaborative editing environments (e.g., Wiki-Webs), and Content Management Systems (CMS). Here again the emphasis on collaboration architectures from MS VSTS and IBM Rational Jazz appear to be setting the bar, with ALF still serving as a decent incentive for many other vendors. Integration of version-control tools with content-management seems to have taken place only in the form of CMS' with versioning capabilities. The notion of integrating the two together doesn't seem to have taken off yet.

Convergence of CM tools and Content Management Systems (CMS) capabilities
Here, Brad seems to have been way off (or maybe it's an idea whose time hasn't come -- yet). With more and more Web-based software and the rise of XML usage, it would seem natural that source-code and active/dynamic content increasingly need to be managed together. Yet there seems to be very little work going on in this area.

Real Tacking Tool
This has definitely been happening in the Agile world, and is on the rise. Despite the call from many of the most prominent vocal voices in the Agile community to "not go gently" into that good tracking database, more and more are resorting to doing just that, but with