Hi Andrew,
just to give you some feeling of 'you are not alone...' ;-)
We are a small but growing software company (50 people ) with a development team of
around 10 people.
We are also currently using VSS, but the switch to SVN is already decided
and we will do that in about three or four weeks. The pain caused by VSS,
especially when developing with VisualStudio 2005, is big enough, so that even our
very censorious developers are happy with this decision.
One story from our history might interest you:
About seven years ago, we had planned to introduce a large scale Configuration
Management tool, because we thought this would become necessary in our growing
company context.
We had a look at some of them (including ClearCase, which we dismissed soon
because it was simply to expensive with too much overhead for us).
We decided to evaluate Continuus (now named 'Telelogic Synergy'), but by
a mistake in our management we then bought it without first evaluating it;
an expensive misunderstanding.
Anyway, since we now had it, we tried to implement it and shortly spoking, although
I spent nights to costumize it for our needs, it caused a medium sized mutiny
in our development team and the result was that we soon stopped using it and switched
back to VSS.
The need of a large scale Configuration Management tool was soon replaced by implementing
agile software development processes from Xtreme Programming and Scrum.
The moral of this:
What we soon had realised was that a large scale Configuration Management tool was
just too much for us; we simply did not need it.
It is important to differentiate between a Source Control tool and a Configuration Management tool,
the latter being much more with some need to redefine the company's processes.
In a company context with many highly interweaved development teams or a company
with a huge amount of different software configurations that have to be managed,
it may be useful to get a tool like ClearCase, but that is more than just switching
the source code base.
If your company just needs a new Source Control tool, ClearCase would be like
buying a 20 ton truck for the daily shopping at the supermarket.
In this case IMHO SVN is just the right thing.
Although for the developers it definitely means an adjustment from the VSS-
lock-modify-unlock- to the copy-modify-merge- paradigm of SVN.
But, as I said, our developers are looking forward to it.
Don't know if this is of any use for you, but I found this very close
to the things that we have gone through.
Good luck,
Regards,
Jörg Rohrschneider
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Received on Wed May 9 15:50:29 2007