Book Image

IBM Rational ClearCase 7.0: Master the Tools That Monitor, Analyze, and Manage Software Configurations

By : Marc Girod, Tatiana Shpichko
Book Image

IBM Rational ClearCase 7.0: Master the Tools That Monitor, Analyze, and Manage Software Configurations

By: Marc Girod, Tatiana Shpichko

Overview of this book

<p>Undeniably, IBM Rational ClearCase is one of the major Software Configuration Management (SCM) tools on the market, and an integral part of a development environment. It introduced significant novelties into SCM, making it an original and insightful tool, and it's precisely these features that are often underutilized by ClearCase users. This book will show readers how to use ClearCase to its full potential and take advantage of its build auditing and dependency analysis applied to derived objects, workspace management with dynamic views, and its support for distributed development with ClearCase MultiSite. Through mastering ClearCase tools, this book will demonstrate that ClearCase is for users, and not only for the administrators.</p> <p>The book capitalizes on the main competitive advantage of ClearCase: that, thanks to build avoidance, ClearCase can focus on and identify derived objects through build management. This practical guide will help you master the tools for monitoring, analyzing, and managing software configurations with ClearCase.</p> <p>The book spends as little time as possible setting the scene. It delves straight into the ClearCase essentials of Build Management, which serves as the basis for the whole book.</p> <p>By the end of the book you will have learned how to master and optimize the various tasks pertaining to both administration and day-to-day development, in both a single-site and a multi-site environment. The emphasis is on ensuring the collaborative management of software development. Special attention is paid to third-party tool management under ClearCase and many practical examples are given, with a particular focus on the command line and scripting as a means to maximize flexibility and management over one's work.</p> <p>This book is a practical guide that highlights and demonstrates those specific functions not traditionally expected from an SCM tool, and supported only by ClearCase.</p>
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
IBM Rational ClearCase 7.0: Master the Tools That Monitor, Analyze, and Manage Software Configurations
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Teaser
8
Tools Maintenance
10
Administrative Concerns

Summary—wrapping up


We hope that we could give some evidence of the complexity of merging. We believe that this complexity is typically underestimated, and that designing development processes based on branch patterns that imply a lot of merging is asking for trouble: it spreads this complexity to realms in which it doesn't belong, making the resulting complexity artificial.

We believe that rolling back changes gives a convincing example: it is incomparably simpler and more reliable to move back a label than to perform a subtractive merge. The apparent problem with the former is that the version belonging to the baseline, the one bearing the label, is after the rollback not the latest on the branch. Why should this be a problem? We can only find bad and artificial reasons: "Doctor, when I hit my head on the wall, it hurts".

If one decides to identify the baseline with labels, one doesn't care anymore on what branch the baseline version of any element is sitting: merging "back" to integration...