The Business Case for AccuRev

Business really is more complex in the 21st Century. Developing ever more complex products faster, better and cheaper requires IT to adopt distributed development, parallel development, and multiple development processes. Most software configuration management strategies and tools buckle under the strain of these new requirements. To compete in today's market requires a tool that adapts to your development needs, rather than imposes its own process on you. It doesn't matter if your process is extreme, distributed, unified, scrum, or waterfall - AccuRev will allow you to orchestrate the process. AccuRev was designed from the ground up to support:

Parallel Development:
Developers no longer need to wait on each other. With AccuRev's unique architecture, featuring isolated developer workspaces, and easy stream creation, change conflicts can be easily managed. If conflicts do arise, AccuRev provides strong diff and merge tools and detailed revision history.

Distributed Development:
AccuRev enables fully distributed development regardless of whether you have many small teams, or many large teams. Control the granularity of changes, the selective isolation of teams, and repository replication all with full transactionality, full audit control and complete reproducibility.

Industry-leading TCO:
AccuRev's low administration, training, and implementation costs combine with seamless integrations into industry-standard IDEs to enable productivity almost out of the box.

Compliance and Security:
AccuRev's architecture, including an append-only repository and full transactions enforces process rigor and eases the burden of new regulatory and compliance regimes such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

Automation Is the Key to Compliance

Large corporations spent an average of $10M on compliance activities in 2004. For many small and medium-size companies, their auditing spend in 2005 was ten times what they typically spent in the years before the advent of Sarbanes-Oxley.

Compliance is really less a specific practice than a change of mindset; companies must embrace the new guidelines, controls, auditing and accountability. Ultimately, the burden of proof for compliance is on the corporate entity to show due diligence on internal process management. Other compliance regimes like HIPAA, Basel II, and 21 CFR Part 11 add greater accountability to the data you gather and exchange, and your business and IT processes.

AccuRev is based on the idea of the append-only transaction database: compliance support is designed into its architecture. The key is not only to support compliance standards, but to enforce compliance policy in the everyday interactivity of the tools used by your software teams day in, day out.

TimeSafe® architecture:

AccuRev operations are based on atomic transactions that either complete or fail to an append-only database. Most SCM systems do not use append-only databases and atomic transactions. Those systems can run into problems such as half-completed check-ins, or file fetches that bring in changes from in progress check-ins. The end-result: broken builds or builds that work but were created from a set of sources that have never been tested together and can't be reproduced.

The benefits of time safety accrue to:

Auditors (eases SOX and other compliance management)
Project leaders (can look across project components to ensure project integrity)
Release Engineers (roll-back to arbitrary snapshots)
QA and developers (maintain multiple field releases with ease)

AccuRev's design reflects its goal to accurately reproduce all past and present information. To this end, AccuRev SCM enforces rules that any versioning, label, configuration, object creation, deletion and renaming all occur under audit control and are reproducible. Security constraints on access, an append-only database, transactional control and integrity checks ensure that an AccuRev depot is not corrupted.

AccuRev was designed from the ground up to give you the flexibility and built-in best practices required by your many development processes. This frees developers from the encumbrances of systems that force them toward less than optimal development models.

Stop Worrying: Reliability, Transparency, Productivity

Complex development forces organizations to strain the capabilities of their existing tools, tools that weren't designed to handle distributed and parallel development. As the strain intensifies, transparency, and reliability become issues, ultimately decreasing productivity. AccuRev's design reduces and eliminates most of the pain points of complex software configuration.

AccuRev doesn't impose its model of SCM on its users; instead, it offers configurable policies, and with its innovative StreamBrowser™, an easy to use interface that allows your staff the ability to implement your ideal SCM development structure. AccuRev's flexibility enables the business to phase project changes in, as required, rather than forcibly migrating projects to the new policies upon adoption. AccuRev handles the case where a compliance check needs to be created and added to a given project with a few mouse clicks.

AccuRev's ability to easily configure and reconfigure development streams means that Release Engineering can quickly set up new streams for new projects, freeing them up to spend more time on process improvement and less time administering a tool. It is just as simple to set up "known good" streams representing stable points during development. QA can get access to known development points on a regular basis, enabling them to give feedback to developers earlier and more frequently during development. Development team leads can easily manage the setup of team streams and team process for their own teams.

Broad Platform Support, Open Standards

For your development teams, AccuRev offers broad support for the tools that are already on your workbench.

AccuRev provides a cross-platform, consistent user interface without sacrificing performance, by using a mix of cross-platform technologies, such as Java for the presentation layer, TCP/IP for all communication, and C++ for the server. Open APIs, the use of XML import/export for AccuWork, and the expanding AccuBridge family of integrations allow for easy integration with other tools in the enterprise landscape.

AccuRev runs on all major software platforms and features integration with popular software development IDE's such as Eclipse and Microsoft® Visual Studio®. It also features a rich command line interface.

Issue tracking is supported via AccuWork as well as several specific AccuBridge packaged integrations with other testing tools. The AccuBridge Application Programming Interface (API) opens up AccuRev to other integration targets. We are constantly expanding our list of supported integrations as well. If your tool isn't on the list yet, be sure to ask us about new integrations.

Hours Not Days: Tools for Agility

Agility is often posed as the opposite of developing with a rigorous process. It's not. Rigor is needed; indeed, many agile projects have failed due to inadequate SCM control. Too much rigor, and release cycles drag on forever. Agility is really about finding dynamic balance between the needs of the business for visibility, control and accountability and the needs of your development staff for ease of use, flexibility and productivity. AccuRev enables that balance by allowing IT to support virtually any development process and SCM development hierarchy that an organization uses.

What is the value of agility, practically speaking? Agility might mean:

The ability to quickly integrate a new codebase from a recently acquired company into the development stream of an existing project

The ability to re-create an entire build or release in an instant to solve a support incident
The ability to change a development process mid-stream with minimal impact on ongoing work
Or just more power for your Release Engineering group to organize releases for teams working in multiple locations, with multiple developers working on multiple projects-new code and maintenance in perfect harmony-and releases flowing regularly among numerous release branches.

Agility is ultimately measured in real-world productivity across the software development lifecyle. AccuRev is packaged for agility and agile development.

Best of Breed Software Configuration Management (SCM)

AccuRev is the best-of-breed SCM solution for distributed and parallel software development. AccuRev is committed to maintaining its best-of-breed position through focused integration with other leading products. Through its open architecture, open APIs, open XML use and a substantial command-line interface, AccuRev has developed interfaces to Eclipse, Visual Studio, and other popular development tools.

The Next Generation of SCM Tools Is Here Today

You've made the right choice to look around to see what's new in Software Configuration Management. AccuRev gives you best-of-breed SCM tools designed from the ground up for 21st Century software configuration.

AccuRev does its most convincing work in use. Evaluation copies are available on all platforms; make it a part of your evaluation, have your users download and compare it with other tools. We believe the result will validate what thousands of AccuRev users recognize: the product has capabilities that no other system can match.

Click here to download and evaluate AccuRev