Kronos chooses AccuRev to optimize their software Development Process

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Customer Profile

With a long history of natural growth and acquisitions, Kronos Incorporated was facing two significant challenges - integrating a number of software development organizations, each with its own source control system, and providing a software configuration management (SCM) solution to support these groups' collaboration on a common code base. "With 400 development and QA engineers distributed across Massachusetts, Florida, Texas, Illinois, as well as two offshore groups, we were using at least five version control systems, and recognized the need to move to one," says John Morris, Kronos Director of Quality and Release Engineering. To address that need, Kronos implemented AccuRev's solution.

Kronos is the most trusted name in workforce management. More than 20 million people use a Kronos solution every day. Its flagship Workforce Central® suite is comprised of applications that help organizations staff, develop, deploy, track, and reward their workforce. Its engineering department, with legacies as discrete autonomous divisions, used to be organized separately around each Kronos product. The local and remote collaboration required for future development work drove the need to adopt a common infrastructure.

Kronos chose proven AccuRev software to provide the SCM foundation for its complex, changing, and massively parallel development environment. "We needed to find a tool which would allow collaborative development on a common code base, but which would also facilitate the movement of large pieces of code between teams. With the deployment of AccuRev, we have been able to segment our projects into isolated areas and merge them back into the common base with minimal effort. This was challenging before AccuRev," states John Morris, Kronos Director of Quality and Release Engineering.

"Being able to accommodate remote development was a competitive
advantage of AccuRev."

Time for a Change in SCM

Kronos had previously tried other solutions, however, none ultimately met their key requirements of a SCM system, including the ability to provide a dynamic platform for changing process and overall ease-of-use. For example, one group, which used a popular commercial solution, was not pleased with the product's requirement that their engineering process conform to the tool's workflow – preferring instead that the tool adapt to the group's process. Another group using an open source solution was unhappy with the lack of support available to them. In addition, many of the development groups were using a popular tool which presented some serious obstacles, such as branches that were too expensive in terms of computing resources, and merges whose difficulty was verging on the impossible. For some time, the teams also had to cope with its error prone database. As an example of its lack of scalability - in one project, a single branch was taking four to five hours, which provided an unacceptable opportunity for data corruption (it now takes just seconds with AccuRev software). On top of all of this, Kronos was also hitting constraints that required them to distribute its projects across five servers. In short, "Kronos simply outgrew this popular SCM tool's architecture and capabilities," explains Morris.

At a strategic level, Kronos needed a new solution. Kronos determined that AccuRev's unique stream-based architecture would give them a competitive advantage by enabling their desired optimal development processes. The methodology Kronos used to choose a vendor involved a year long effort to compare their SCM requirements to industry offerings. During this process, AccuRev met a weighted set of Kronos criteria including high priority requirements to support advanced parallel development, ease of branching and merging, as well as being a commercial product with low cost administration and excellent support.

Also critical to Kronos was allowing remote access to its SCM solution over existing connections. According to Morris, "being able to accommodate remote development was a competitive advantage of AccuRev." AccuRev is architected to enable seamless development via TCP/IP over both dial-up and broadband connections.

While AccuRev's integrated StreamBrowser™ provides an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for most of Kronos' needs, a powerful command line interface is available for commonly scripted operations like the nightly builds. Kronos was impressed with AccuRev's unique TimeSafe® architecture which eliminates broken builds and indeterminate states due to failures during check-in or synchronization, and allows Kronos to reproduce any build, at any time. An equally notable aspect of this architecture is its preservation of the past. Its ability to get any build from any point in the past was a feature the team judged to be of very high value, based on experience with other SCM products that are unable to provide this functionality.

"We restructured our source tree to match our organization around a suite of products which meant moving many thousands of files between projects and merging them again. In some cases, these huge merges could be done in a matter of minutes - operations we knew couldn't be done at all in our existing SCM tool," states Morris. "We found we could get going with relatively light pain and we jumped in and have no regrets."

The process identified a winner from among five leaders in the SCM market, including established file-based branch and label tools vendors. AccuRev prevailed with its ability to deliver next-generation SCM with low implementation, training, and ongoing costs, as well as a willingness to partner with Kronos' other development tool vendors. AccuRev also exhibited an in-depth understanding of Kronos' challenges and goals. In fact, within one hour AccuRev was able to create a targeted demonstration using the actual Kronos development environment.

Development, Quality Assurance, Release Engineering, the Architecture team, Custom Engineering, and Technical Publications were the functional groups involved in both the selection and the AccuRev deployment. They now use AccuRev software for mainstream development, creating patches (i.e. emergency repairs), handling service packs, performing custom engineering, as well as advanced research and development.

Kronos planned a large pilot project that would use AccuRev for six months before rolling it out to the rest of engineering. However, a groundswell of interest from release engineers and development leads, who found they needed AccuRev to do things they couldn't do in their existing SCM tool, caused the implementation process to speed up.

Summary

Kronos has now migrated virtually all product development to AccuRev configuration management software, and is benefiting from the improved overall development processes implemented using AccuRev. With AccuRev software, Kronos now has a competitive advantage in the software workforce management marketplace.

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