CM Generations and a Vision for the Future

must be fully integrated, seamlessly, so that the user is not aware of multiple management tool interfaces or the delays which occur by having queries which span multiple repositories.

It's also imperative that the processes reflect the customer's processes. Yet the customer does not want to be burdened with defining the correct process up front before using the CM tool. In fact, the customer won't understand the CM problem domain until well along the development and release road map. So it will be imperative that incremental changes can be made quickly and easily without any down time.

Yes, But Can I Get At My Data

Reliability and availability are crucial factors when deadlines are tight or teams are large. An outage of even a couple of hours can be costly. A 3G CM tool is not at the mercy of a server or network link. Nor is it acceptable that the tool presents poor performance as the number of concurrent users climb. 3G criteria includes:

• High reliability and availability (less than 24 hrs outage/year including scheduled upgrades)
• Full transaction journaling and data recovery capabilities
• Availability of on-line user forums and support centers
• Advanced Backup and/or Redundancy Capabilities

"Smart client" technology and other such techniques are used to off-load the server and network. Local caching and, where necessary, data replication are used to ensure point-and-click performance capabilities. Data redundancy, transaction journaling and automated data recovery capabilities ensure that outages do not occur across the entire development team, and can be recovered from in minutes.

As CM repositories grow in size, and with a high transaction rate, advanced backup capabilities are required which require no down time and which are quick to backup and easy to restore. It is not feasible to do nightly backups of hundreds of gigabytes of project data. Nor is it reasonable to require dozens of incremental backups to be retrieved before a project's data can be restored in response to a disk crash. Reasonable disaster recovery support must be provided, not just by the IT department, but by the CM tool itself, as it is now a key component of the IT strategy.

It Keeps Getting Better

The thing about 3G CM is that, although it is handling an ever increasingly complex set of problems and capabilities, it is easier to use, and user acceptance becomes much less of an issue than with a 2G tool. What are the barriers? Is it slow, complex, non-intuitive, insufficiently flexible? Key criteria in the area of Useability include:

• Accessibility from all major platforms, especially Unix and Windows
• Rapid performance supporting point-and-click navigation of data
• Flexible reporting and interactive query, with well-designed pre-packaged reports
• Support for advanced merge capabilities such as change propagation/yank and product-wide operations
• Provision of context-sensitive on-line help, preferably in the form of process guidance
• User-selectable differencing and merge tools
• Good remote access performance using IP-based protocols (not requiring disk mounting)
• Operation across multiple sites

A 3G CM tool must support, at a minimum, 3 types of user interfaces: Unix, Windows and Web. Ideally, these are all the same or at least very similar in look and feel. In particular, Web based access should bridge legacy platforms where native interfaces are otherwise unavailable. And please don't tell me that I have to learn a new interface because I've moved from one platform to another.

The 3G tool provides good management level reports: metrics, change summaries, release note support, SVD/VDD generation. Reports are needed which are specific to each area of the tool: requirements, project management, problem tracking, change management, build and release management, test suite management, and perhaps