AccuRev Key to Sterling Commerce
Global Development Strategy

Success Highlights

Users and Environment

Team leads, developers, release engineers, QA and documentation users in India, Massachusetts and Ohio
Mission-critical software for data warehouse, supply chain management and transportation management
Approximately 10 major releases per year; however, including hot fixes, one or two per week, resulting in over 114 releases per year. Some products with more than 50,000 files, totaling over 500,000 files, under development in AccuRev
Java JSP and Eclipse development environment

AccuRev Success Highlights

Remote performance has significantly increased and is much more reliable, yielding thousands of dollars in cost savings each year.
Build release process has been automated and optimized, now four times faster using AccuRev.
Creating a snapshot for every hot fix released to a customer has improved productivity and quality.
One part-time release engineer can support nearly 300 developers without any issues.
Instant workspace or new release stream creation is now instantaneous.

Customer Profile
Sterling Commerce, a subsidiary of AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T), helps customers thrive in a global economy by connecting their business communities, processes, people and technology. More than 30,000 customers worldwide – including 80 percent of the Fortune 500 – use Sterling Commerce solutions for business process integration, multi-channel selling and supply chain execution to improve profitability inside and outside their company walls. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Sterling Commerce has offices in 19 countries and most major cities around the world. For more information, please go to www.sterlingcommerce.com.

Background

AccuRev was introduced to Sterling Commerce in 2005 when the company decided to evaluate its development process and work toward world-class best practices that would improve its internal operations while bringing value to its customers.

Through acquisitions, Sterling Commerce was using two different version control tools, a market-leading version control tool for a development team of roughly 300 in the US and India, and a popular file-based branch and label tool for a second development team of roughly 50 in the US.

Product Development Challenges Drives Evaluation

Sterling Commerce must manage seven simultaneous parallel product releases that are on different schedules. Some of these products are dependent on other products, and older versions continue to have very active maintenance streams. This made for a fairly complex development environment that was under-serviced by the file-based software configuration management (SCM) tool in use. As branching was not done with the previous tool, Sterling Commerce was replicating entire code trees. Not only did this keep increasing the size of the database, but once during every release it might take up to six or seven hours to copy the code tree. This was very CPU-intensive and forced developers to stay out of the system during this time.

The following are some of the main reasons that led Sterling to conduct an extensive review of leading SCM tools to better manage its development environment:

Poor remote access performance for users in India
An inability to manage multiple parallel releases and issue emergency hot fixes and patches
An inability to easily tell what version a customer was using through snapshots
The increasing size of the products being managed
Minimal security and access-rights permissions

In its review, Sterling Commerce pitted open source and legacy SCM tools against AccuRev. AccuRev was chosen as the best overall solution to solve the above-mentioned challenges and for its ability to isolate code changes prior to checking them into an integration stage or mainline development.

Converting to AccuRev

Sterling Commerce exported baselines out of its file-based SCM tool and into AccuRev utilizing the AccuRev snapshot functionality. This was very straightforward and simple, according to the release manager, and took approximately 15 minutes per release. Additionally, despite the build process moving from the United States to India during implementation, AccuRev was rolled out in an efficient and seamless manner.

"AccuRev has optimized our US- and India-based software development teams to manage multiple parallel development streams and reduce our total cost and complexity of development and maintenance. The product was easy to implement and has been easy to maintain. We were so pleased with the AccuRev product implementation that we gave a corporate award to our release engineer for the smooth and efficient rollout of the product." Steven Aulds, Senior VP, Supply Chain Applications, Sterling Commerce

Benefits of AccuRev

Improved Remote Access Performance Enhances Geographically Distributed and Offshore Development

Sterling Commerce believes in the value of leveraging development in multiple geographies. The majority of the company’s development staff is located in Bangalore, India, with additional teams in Massachusetts, Ohio and California in the United States. The AccuRev AccuReplica server ensures that teams have the same performance and the same look and feel, whether in India or the US, and teams work unaware of the replication, as if they were co-located. AccuReplica provides centralized administration that eliminates the need for an additional administrator and avoids coding conflicts that arise when replication models found in some other SCM tools are used. Improved remote access performance and its effect on development productivity are one of the biggest areas of savings for Sterling Commerce with AccuRev, yielding thousands of dollars in cost savings each year.

Maintenance and Hot-Fix Process Automation Improves Quality and Responsiveness

Sterling Commerce also has realized a major advantage in the quality of its maintenance and hot-fix processes in the move to AccuRev. By completely automating these processes with the ability to create a snapshot for every hot fix it releases to a customer, AccuRev has reduced the manual effort and errors caused by the previous SCM tool. This has improved quality and responsiveness to customer requests by reducing the time it takes to handle these processes. For example, if an existing customer on an older version wants the same fix, it can be supplied immediately by taking the code from the old snapshot in that development stream. Prior to AccuRev, it was impossible to tell what version of code a customer was using.

A quick diff between two streams instantly shows what files have changed, allowing a developer to pull out just those changed files from the source code to perform a new build. This gives Sterling Commerce the ability to quickly test different scenarios, in this case customer hot fixes or patches, by building a release with changes from another maintenance release before committing the changes to the new hot-fix stream or migrating them to mainline development. AccuRev has automated and optimized the entire build release process. With these improvements, Sterling Commerce has estimated this process has been reduced from two hours to 30 minutes.

Flexible Process Control Increases Agility

As it implemented new best practices, Sterling Commerce found that AccuRev provided agility in implementing changes in its development model without disruption to day-to-day work. For example, Sterling easily switched to a selective code review process, all through the graphical drag-and-drop capabilities of the StreamBrowser GUI.

AccuRev is also tied in to the company’s issue-tracking tool via AccuWork to associate code changes with the correct issue ID to better track support-related issues.

Ease of Administration Reduces Maintenance

Maintenance of AccuRev is low, enabling Sterling Commerce to support its approximately 300 users on the system with only one release engineer, who acts as a part-time administrator. With the previous SCM tool, because Sterling Commerce wasn’t able to branch, a copy of each product had to be created. With the large number of files, this would take a long time to complete. Now, adding new users or starting a new version of a product is as simple as right clicking on an existing stream and instantly creating a new stream off of that.

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