And now back to technology.
Nokia has a deep investment in ClearCase as their configuration management tool. Trouble is, its slow, does not support remote access (well, at least), and requires a full-time administrator for each deployment.
Its also quite complicated, based upon my perception, though I admit my view of it could be considered limited. In our environment, many of its features have been locked down. Some of these features include branching and merging. We develop off the trunk which limits us greatly. My theory is that because these features are under such tight control that developers have omitted them from their SCM vocabulary. And as each new developer comes aboard, they are trained to do things as we’ve always done them — develop from the trunk. Branching and merging are features not to spoken of.
But many of us in my organization do not have our heads in the sand. We know that the Open Source world has used CVS for years and that Subversion represents and improvement upon CVS. We see that either of these handles every single use case we could think of and so there is a grass roots move to use them.
However, in doing so, we are meeting with curious resistance. Even though we can make an air-tight case for Subversion, we are still met with questionable reasons why we must still use ClearCase. So now I’m wishing who these people are that say that we should continue to use ClearCase. Are they familiar with our workflow and ever increasing need to work remotely? Its doubtful. I think this is a classic case of sunk-cost infrastructure. As in, we paid for it, thus you shall use it.
Dovetailing off of my previous Thing Big, Act Small post, I think the right thing to do by our organization is to make the proper decision that suits our needs as if we were in business by ourselves. I know that sounds like I advocate defying corporate standards, but in this case, the standard doesn’t make sense. We require the above-mentioned features and there is no requirement to share our repository globally. That had been one of the counter-arguments used by the other side. But in my mind, this is akin to the errant requirement to write portable code — how often do you really port code?
So what will we do? Probably beg for forgiveness. I installed a Subversion repository on my laptop and hooked it into to a test project in 10 minutes — and I did so without an administrator. Hopefully, we’ll survive the corporate paddling. I just hope that we get to turn around and see whose wielding the paddle. For him, her, or them, I have questions.
