Tyler Technologies Takes AccuRev Global for Local Governments

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Customer Profile
Tyler Technologies is a leading provider of integrated, end-to-end information management solutions and services to local governments. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, the company provides software and professional IT services to more than 6,000 local government offices throughout all 50 states, Canada, Puerto Rico and the United Kingdom. These mission-critical applications provide counties and municipalities with the ability to streamline and automate operations, resulting in improved productivity and reduced costs. In April 2007, Tyler was named one of "America's 100 Most Trustworthy Companies" by Audit Integrity, an independent research firm. More information about Tyler Technologies can be found at www.tylertech.com.

Corporations such as ISVs, managing a lot of component or Web-based development where software is critical to their business, are increasingly requiring a more agile SCM solution and relying on AccuRev. With a focus on managing an increasing number of releases in parallel in its Microsoft Visual Studio.NET environment, which includes many browser and component-based technologies and tens of thousands of files, Tyler required a more scalable SCM solution with the flexibility to change with its process requirements.

“AccuRev has provided us with greater flexibility and visibility into our development process, and its automation of the patch release process has shaved nearly 50 percent off the time it took with our previous file-based SCM tool. As a result of merger and acquisition activity, a move toward more Agile processes and offshore development, AccuRev was the optimal solution to manage this increasingly parallel development model efficiently.”

Rick Hoff, CTO, Tyler Technologies

AccuRev is currently used by Tyler divisions located in Plano and Lubbock, Texas; Renton, Washington; and Falmouth, Maine. AccuRev with AccuBridge for Atlassian JIRA was selected for its process flexibility in managing offshore teams and multiple parallel releases for various local government clients. Tyler additionally benefits from greater accuracy and reproducibility of software to aid in its ability to deliver projects on time and within budget at a low total cost of ownership.

 

Solving Complex Development Challenges for the Court and Justice Division

Mergers and Acquisitions
Tyler Technologies has acquired a larger group of developers and a number of disparate, file-based SCM tools through merger and acquisition activity over the past few years. A company-wide SCM standardization effort was set forth and an evaluation of all the leading SCM vendor tools was initiated.

Offshore Development Projects
At the time of evaluating the best SCM offerings, Tyler wasn’t sure how its process needed to change or what its requirements for geographically distributed and offshore teams were going to be.

“The real advantage with AccuRev is that we didn’t need to know right at that point; the tool was flexible enough that we could do whatever we thought we needed to do down the road, quickly and without the pain typically associated with SCM tools without flexible process support.”

Chris Puhala, Senior Developer, Tyler Technologies

As the offshore teams are relatively new, Tyler required a way to give those teams secure access to the code in the US, and also monitor the quality of their work through a separate code review stream before pushing it to the main development stream and having it go to the QA process. Compared with the old file-based SCM tool environment, Tyler estimates it takes less than one-tenth the effort with AccuRev to manage this concurrent release and offshore environment, and the company has instilled a great level of confidence in the quality and timeliness of offshore projects.

Associating Code Changes with Issues Across Environments
Prior to AccuRev, there was no association between code and issues across Tyler’s various development environments, increasing the time developers spent manually copying, comparing and verifying code fixes between configurations. With AccuRev, cross-promoting changes tied to an issue is now a significant advantage. Even after months have gone by, it’s easy to identify a fix in one configuration and apply it to another that requires the same change, through a visual drag-and-drop operation.

“Having code changes associated with the issue is a big productivity boost. It really saves time manually copying, comparing and verifying changes. We do a lot of it, so the savings really add up.”

Managing an Increasing Number of Multiple Parallel Releases
Prior to AccuRev, Tyler was managing a fair number of parallel releases for local government clients without branching off the main line. With the customer base growing through increasing sales and merger and acquisition, not to mention the many customizations for specific customers’ unique processes or to meet specific state regulations, the number of releases was beginning to grow. Tyler required more flexibility to support these additional releases in the field so customers wouldn’t feel pressured to constantly upgrade.

Tyler currently manages more than 30 simultaneous parallel releases in the field in an efficient manner with AccuRev. Developers maintaining multiple parallel releases today have to do 25 to 30 percent less work using AccuRev. Maintaining and patching releases was also a time-consuming manual activity, and the time this takes has been cut in half.

The Need for a More Advanced Promotion Model
Prior to AccuRev, developers might have inadvertently promoted code to mainline development and QA before it was ready just to back up their local machines. In other instances, the code might have been tested and ready to go, but several other dependent projects going on simultaneously would not be ready to promote to DEV or QA. The developer working on the dependent project wouldn’t be able to check in his code because it would have automatically gone into the weekly migration to QA.

Using AccuRev’s unique promotion mode, developers can “Keep” changes on their local machines for private versioning, which also makes them available on the main server to be shared with other developers, without exposing them to the weekly migration. This significantly reduces time spent tracking down “false bugs” for code released to mainline development or QA prematurely as well as the number of broken builds.

Developers also no longer have to make duplicate copies of the latest code release database to make changes. Before, every time the development team created a release, if they had three releases out in the field, they would have three separate physical copies of the source, plus their mainline DEV copy. The patching process of multiple releases became very cumbersome as Tyler’s customers were demanding that more releases be supported.

If a bug was identified in the oldest version of the source, developers had to go back and manually fix it in each snapshot copy, plus the mainline DEV source. Additionally, without issue/code association between files in those different environments, it became error-prone and difficult to manage. Now when a developer makes a change, he can automatically apply that change to all the relevant configurations that require it, by using change packages.

Having moved to AccuRev, all of Tyler’s releases are now tied together. When developers create a snapshot of a release, it’s simply a matter of creating the stream and locking it, providing an instantaneous representation of the configuration without having to make a physical copy of the source.

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