Agile SCM - Review of 2007 and Predictions for 2008

of IBM opening up access to Jazz ALM , takes it in a new direction by enhancing collaboration.

Meanwhile IBM will be digesting its recent acquisition of Telelogic and we watch with curiosity to see what happens with the Telelogic product line. Just considering relative market share and product strengths, we assume that the DOORS requirements management product seems to have a clear future, although the future of the Synergy product looks perhaps a little less secure longer term given its overlaps with ClearCase (but maybe they are big enough to support both?!).

Another interesting response is AccuRev 4.6 for ClearCase - which gives a new spin on collaboration as a way of helping competition (concurrent engineering), in this case by allowing a competing solution (AccuRev) to co-exist with (in their eyes) a "legacy" solution (ClearCase) for purposes of evaluation/comparison and (ideally) transition & replacement. AccuRev is clearly targeting ClearCase with their marketing, and this approach seems to be their best bet for getting in to existing accounts and encouraging potential customers to try them out.

Vendor competition is generally a good thing for customers!

Among other vendors, CollabNet launched its CollabNet Enterprise Edition 5.0 during 2007 featuring increased collaboration functionality through wiki capabilities among other things. They are also touting the extensible platform and ability to integrate with other tools. As part of a similar trend, Borland launched its Open ALM Platform.

Continuous Integration and Sexy Builds!
Continuous Integration has been catching on like gangbusters, including not just the frequency of integration, but the number of commercial tools claiming to support or implement it in some way. This is a key Agile practice, reinforcing as it does continuous and early feedback.

In addition, as the Dr Dobbs June 2007 article notes:  Build is against all logic, sexy - what's with that?! We were very heartened to see this article, and the listing of a variety of (relatively) new vendors who are making a good living solving the problems in this space. We do of course claim prior art in our February 2007 article The Renaissance Builder ! And, in fact, builds have always been central to the SCM Patterns, starting with the patterns from 1999 written up in  Software Reconstruction: Patterns for Reproducing Software Builds.

Onwards and Upwards with Open Source
Subversion 1.5 is a big event in the open source world: it marks the presence of the long awaited "smart merge" support in the most popular open-source VC tool. While not yet officially "out of the door", it is very close to final status, and has been imminent for a couple of months. While some of us thought the lack of merge tracking support would hinder the adoptance of the tool, it doesn't seem to have done so, but this is going to make a big difference in our opinion.

Indeed, it was hoped that the release would be announced at the first Subconf in Munich in October 2007. With several hundred attendees, and many industry presentations, the event was proof of the success of Subversion. As well as a couple of excellent keynotes from Brian Behlendorf and Karl Fogel (these address various issues around the difficulties of starting and guiding successful open source developments), Martin Doettling presented some interesting figures:

• Estimated user base now exceeds 2 million
• 10x growth since 1.4

• Large numbers of enterprise users

The release of Bazaar (bzr) 1.0 is also significant in that it shows the vibrancy of the development of distributed tools. Other tools continuing to gain mind share and users include Git, Mercurial and Darcs.

ITIL V3
We mentioned the