We are currently managing a Beta release of our main product line.  The management of the source code is easy thanks to AccuRev, and here’s why:

1) Stream inheritance is just plain awesome!

We manage hundreds of streams to make up our suite.  We are able to promote code up through task streams, to integration streams, to qa streams where we ship.  For the Beta, we have child streams qa.beta, and our build machines use these streams.

2) Snapshots rule!

Snapshots by definition are immutable.  So you know what you built, when you built it.  Our build process creates snapshots automatically, and we fetch code based on snapshot.  We have 100% confidence in knowing what went into a build, and our snapshots are named to a pattern i.e. <parent stream>.yyyymmddhhmmss.build<build number>.  That gives one a lot of info about a build.

3) Timelocks let you stabilize code, even if set the next day!

We built our Beta release on snapshot, and the next day we retroactively set time locks on the qa.beta streams based on build time, and we access locked them down.  Now we can finalize the Beta, and still allow other integration and qa work to happen.

In summary, if we were using a traditional branch/merge SCM, this would be a lot of work and require dedicated personnel.  Instead, we did this part time and the StreamBrowser makes is so easy to see what code is where and why.  There is no confusion with views or other techniques used by other vendors.