AccuRev Streams Flow to the Enterprise -- Visual Studio Magazine

AccuRev Streams Flow to the Enterprise

By Doug Barney
10/07/2008

AccuRev, a software change and configuration management (SCCM) tool, has just been enhanced for to support larger, more distributed development teams.

The tool, which competes with ClearCase, Perforce and Subversion, is now on version 4.7, the company recently announced.

Key new features include multi-server support allowing x86 servers to support thousand of developers. "This release enables our enterprise customers to scale to thousands of users," said Cliff Utstein, AccuRev's vice president of marketing and business development.

AccuRev was founded by Damon Poole and began shipping commercial software products in 2002. Poole was a former ClearCase user who thought he had a better approach to managing code. That approach is streams, objects that include the history of software changes. Because these streams have a hierarchical structure, they inherit changes developers make downstream, and reportedly save time and effort when merging code.

"Streams are analogous to a combination of branches and process workflow (typically in a separate tool) in legacy systems (but) they are far more flexible and powerful, enabling unencumbered branching and merging operations. Streams understand their process based relationships to other streams and include built-in inheritance, whereas branches do neither," the company explained.

The Multi-Server Approach
With AccuRev 4.7, development shops can now install basic servers over which code in progress can be partitioned, stored, distributed and shared. "Servers can act as team servers, continuous integration servers or build servers. And this can be done on the LAN or over the WAN," said Utstein. This also allows AccuRev to handle "hundreds of thousands of files in a single workspace," according to the company.

With AccuRev, shops can "ship higher quality software without regressions, and take advantage of things like continuous integration and even do multistage continuous integration," Utstein argued.

An Avid User
AccuRev also announced that Avid Technology is a new customer and will use AccuRev to manage its development process. Avid, which builds sophisticated video tools, has some 400 developers that work with Macs, Windows and Linux. Avid software processes are a mix of Agile and non-Agile. "The ability of AccuRev to support Agile and non-Agile development processes, as well as streamline code sharing between different teams was a major consideration," said Michael Madden, vice president, engineering at Avid in an AccuRev press release.

About the Author

Doug Barney is editor in chief of Redmond magazine and the VP, editorial director of Redmond Media Group.

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