I am properly jinxing things by writing this, if so I will shoot my self at a later time, and of course blog about it before hand.

For the past 6-9months or so we have been under the torture of ClearCase and ClearQuest, Actually I think I would prefer actual torture to those tools, but that is another story, but finally after a very long struggle which I can only pad my team on the back for, we are beginning to see an end of all this.

So you finally saw the light that ClearCase & ClearQuest brings?

If realizing that ClearCase & ClearQuest will always stand as the worlds to day best example of “How NOT to do things” then yes, I have seen the light, hey that could actually be useful in the future if you think about it, imagine the SVN team or Jira Team standing in front of a question of how to implement a new feature in the system and they are in doubt, look at how ClearCase and/or ClearQuest and how IBM did it, and then place your solution as far away from that as possible, I promise it can only be better.

No what really happened for us here is that the ones selecting the tool in the first place accepted that it may not have been the best thing they did here, and well we can only learn from our mistakes.

As things turn out it might even be a good one, because what it all started out with when we first raised all our problems was that the company should find an alternative to ClearCase & ClearQuest for smaller projects, in other words projects that from their perspective didn’t need all of the “Good” features of ClearCase & ClearQuest, but since then we are now talking about a complete replacement to ClearCase & ClearQuest instead, so for that I might even view the 6-9 months as having brought some true value in that they have shown that ClearCase & ClearQuest is just a bad idea across the board and not just for small projects.

Replacements on the horizon?

Now the replacements being reviewed is Subversion, Mercurial and Rational Team Concert.

Subversion

Subversion is somewhat the safe bet, after all for years it has proven it self to both scale fairly well and support the daily work in a very non-intrusive manner, it has been well tested over the years.

But being an old horse can also have it’s downsides of course, it wouldn't still be alive today if it wasn’t good, and it is one of my favorite tools for source control, but it doesn’t contain a whole lot of all the new features that tools like Git, Mercurial, Perforce etc. has.

I could argue that one can live without that, and certainly I believe that to be true, but what if I could get all the good stuff from Subversion and on top of that deliciousness also get a cherry on top?

One thing that is obvious is that Subversion can only replace ClearCase as a tool, while ClearQuest needs to be replaced by something else that also works with Subversion, here Jira would most likely be the tool of choice, and I could almost not stay seated in my chair of pure joy when that was mentioned.

Mercurial

Mercurial is what we are looking into testing right now to see if it can lift the task and then take it from there, I mean we can fall back on Subversion if it shows to be a bad choice, but ill put a rest on that since I am not that familiar with it.

That is why I can’t talk much about upsides and downsides for this tool besides that it is newer than Subversion, so it hopefully developed with a good bag of experience from all the good things that brought us.

Again, as it was with Subversion, this only replaces ClearCase and lacks the ClearQuest counterpart, but we are in luck again, Jira integrates with Mercurial as well, so the same solution could apply here.

Team Concert

The big horse. (Compared to the above solutions RTC is a big horse, compared to ClearCase & ClearQuest it is still small, I could aim at certain things beyond pure subjective opinions since I have seen it in action, but I will refrain from doing so since I can’t for sure say there isn’t alternatives to the workflows I saw demonstrated at that point, and what changes newer versions has brought)

Well lets face it, none of us (as in us on my current project) want an IBM replacement at this point, all confidence in that company for me is personally lost, I have yet to see a Licensed IBM piece of software that is actually well working. Even Eclipse has gone somewhat down the hill (To clarify, eclipse started out with a good momentum, it lacked a huge amount of features in the very beginning, but was at least a fast IDE, over the time the Feature part might have improved, but the IDE is degraded in performance as a consequence, that is what I mean when I say it has gone down hill). ever since IBM got involved (Eclipse was started by Object Technology International (OTI), which was acquired by IBM back in 1996, so Eclipse was in other words started by IBM)

As a big difference to the others, Team Concert is the whole package where as Subversion and Mercurial both will need a 3rd party tool for replacing ClearQuest, Team Concert has “work items/task items (or whatever they call it)” integrated which replaces that need.

Conclusion

Besides being overly happy about the fact that we might not need to suffer under the strict rule of ClearCase & ClearQuest much longer, what I would really somewhat like was to select both Subversion and Mercurial for a period, and see how that went.

But getting rid off ClearCase & ClearCase can almost come at any price and would still be acceptable.