Best-of-Breed ALM Shines Delivering on ROI Promise

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Customer Profile

World Wide Packets is a leading provider of Carrier Ethernet solutions that allow broadband service providers and telecommunications carriers to realize a new level of speed and agility in the deployment of revenue-generating Ethernet services. With World Wide Packets' LightningEdge® product family, providers can address the demand with their growing customer base by fully leveraging the power, flexibility and economies of Ethernet technology while dramatically reducing the CapEx and OpEx of existing legacy networks. Only World Wide Packets offers the QoS, scalability, reliability and manageability necessary to make True Carrier Ethernet services such as IPTV, VoIP, mission critical data and wireless transport a reality. For more information on World Wide Packets, please visit www.worldwidepackets.com.

"Software configuration management (SCM) is a critical component of any application lifecycle management (ALM) solution. AccuRev enables us to implement a best-of-breed ALM solution to garner increased ROI where single-vendor ALM suites often fail to deliver on that promise." – Dan Melchior, Director of Software

Software Development Challenges

High Hopes for Single-Vendor ALM Approach
World Wide Packets (WWP) purchased a high-end ALM suite four years ago. The SCM component of that suite offered file-based, branch and label software configuration management. As WWP and its projects grew in size and scope, the need to effectively manage multiple projects in parallel became obvious. The team realized it needed a more sophisticated software development process and branching model than was possible with the previous vendor.

"When you buy an ALM suite from a vendor, while one portion of that suite might be best-of-breed, no single vendor is likely to be best-of-breed in all ALM categories, and so the benefit of using AccuRev is that it allows us to combine the best of our old vendor with a true best-of-breed SCM tool (AccuRev)."

Dynamic and Increasingly Sophisticated Parallel Development Models
Due to rapid growth, World Wide Packets was on a nine-month plan to begin isolating and managing three product releases in parallel. Chief Architect Loren Larsen realized his team required the ability to facilitate support of these dynamic and increasingly sophisticated parallel development models and the current tool wasn't going to scale efficiently as they put more demands on it. The new tool also had to easily integrate with its existing issue-tracking solution, MKS Integrity Manager, the workflow component of the ALM suite, which it had been using successfully for four years.

"Most file-based SCM systems let you branch files, but the stream-based view gives us the view we really want and makes it clear which files go together."

Choosing a Replacement

WWP initially learned about AccuRev in Software Development magazine which had awarded it the JOLT Award in the SCM category. After additional research on the Web and an initial review of the demo available on the Web site, Mr. Larsen was intrigued.

World Wide Packets evaluated a number of leading commercial and open source SCM solutions to replace its existing enterprise-level SCM tool. Some of these competing options were dismissed immediately based on team members previous experience, due to concerns about complexity, cost of deployment, and ongoing operational costs. Other tools were dismissed because they added little value beyond CVS for World Wide Packets' more sophisticated branching and merging needs.

Ideally, World Wide Packets is a proponent of "free" open source SCM tools, but previous team member experience had found that the open source model can be expensive to maintain, sometimes requiring multiple full-time administrators to maintain and build scripts. With AccuRev, it takes less than 10 percent of the administrator's time to administer it, and that time is most often spent answering a question every few days.

"Operational expense is minimal with AccuRev."

World Wide Packets utilized the AccuBridge™ for MKS Integrity Manager software development toolkit (SDK) to associate MKS Integrity Manager issue records with AccuRev's integrated issue-tracking. This provides a tightly integrated change-package mechanism for software and release engineers to clearly identify which changes are associated with each defect fix and whether or not that fix has made it into a particular configuration of the code base. At the same time, quality assurance (QA) and sales engineers, customer support and others are able to continue to use their familiar issue-tracking tool, MKS Integrity Manager.

Once finished with the planning and requirements phase, the actual transition from the previous enterprise-level SCM tool to AccuRev only took a few days. With the help of an on-site AccuRev engineer to set up an optimal development process within the AccuRev stream architecture, the team selected the releases it wanted to bring into AccuRev. Acceptance of AccuRev by the team was very positive, even by those who were very familiar with the previous file-based SCM tool.

The process to move the previous SCM tool files into AccuRev was straight forward and efficient. Each product release was assigned its own stream; then a snapshot was created and promoted up to the base stream. The TimeSafe® architecture made migration of existing automated build scripts very easy, as the state of the system can be re-created from any time in the past. World Wide Packets chose not to migrate all the prior revision history information into AccuRev and kept a license of the previous enterprise SCM tool in case it ever has to go back to read a comment on an older version for more detailed history.

More Effective with Best-of-Breed ALM

Outsourcing Project
World Wide Packets was also able, using AccuRev, to easily integrate remote development teams around the world, and according to Loren, "Performance was even impressive over a VPN." A code review stream was created in AccuRev where by the remote developers would check in all their work and then the development team in Spokane, Washington, would propagate the outsourced code into the main stream once it had been properly reviewed. "Creating the additional code review stream for the outsourced development team took only minutes, and when the remote team had completed the outsourced project, we simply promoted the code from the review stream into the main development stream with no impact on team productivity."

Business Benefits
World Wide Packets now has improved support for the parallel development of multiple-feature releases and is seamlessly managing maintenance releases for existing customers. Utilizing AccuRev's stream-based architecture and change packages, World Wide Packets currently manages development in a high-level, change-driven model with greater efficiency. This allows World Wide Packets to share code with greater ease across multiple products and partners and has improved the integrity of the building and tracking of releases.

Additionally, AccuRev offers World Wide Packets the ability to move changes across streams (a first-class generalization of branches) and is much more flexible in allowing World Wide Packets to structure its streams. "We can even put each feature in a stream, and if we want to move a feature from one release to the next, the release manager can literally grab the feature stream and re-parent it into the next release stream. That would be a very difficult operation in a file-based tool."

One illustration of the ongoing benefits is provided by the instance when World Wide Packets was working on two separate releases that were to be merged. The developer on the project — used to using the previous tool — quoted two to three weeks but finished the project in three days by using AccuRev. This developer told Mr. Larsen that, "It was the easiest thing I've ever done. We could never have done this with our previous enterprise SCM tool. With AccuRev, this task was much easier and more efficient than I expected."

"I estimate at least a 2x improvement in merging efficiency."

World Wide Packets has now improved support for parallel development of multiple-feature releases and is seamlessly managing maintenance releases for existing customers. Productivity gains are estimated to be 30 - 40 percent since integrating AccuRev's best-of-breed SCM tool with MKS.

"AccuRev's unique architecture provides an SCM tool that is ideal for managing parallel releases with distributed development teams. It has a highly intuitive interface that minimizes errors and allows us to react quickly to customer and market changes in our rapidly growing market."

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